Publications

GoicoHorton_2023_AnnualRevLinguistics

The term homesign has been used to describe the signing of deaf individuals who have not had sustained access to the linguistic resources of a named language. Early studies of child homesigners focused on documenting their manual communication systems through the lens of developmental psycholinguistics and generative linguistics, but a recent wave of linguistic ethnographic investigations is challenging many of the established theoretical presuppositions that underlie the foundational homesign research. Sparked by a larger critical movement within Deaf Studies led by deaf scholars, this new generation of scholarship interrogates how researchers portray deaf individuals and their communication practices and questions the conceptualization of language in the foundational body of homesign research. In this review, we discuss these contested issues and the current moment of transition within research on homesign.

Horton_2020_Chapter_1

Young children who are deaf, and cannot hear the spoken language in their environment, and who also are not exposed to accessible linguistic input or medical intervention, nonetheless generate productive manual systems to communicate with their hearing family and friends (Goldin-Meadow 2003,Fusellier-Souza 2006). These novel manual communication systems, sometimes referred to as homesign systems, are idiosyncratic to their particular individual child innovator.

Horton_2020_SLS

In Nebaj, Guatemala, deaf residents are born into a community with no established sign language and little contact with the national sign language of Guatemala, Guatemalan Sign Language (GSM). In spite of this, deaf individuals interact with hearing and deaf relatives, friends, and neighbors using their hands. They incorporate both recognizable gestural emblems, used throughout the hearing community, and iconic and deictic signs to engage with others in their communicative ecology. In this article, I explore how Lucia, a deaf woman from Nebaj, mobilizes a genre of interaction, which I refer to as price-checking, to facilitate her conversation with a hearing interlocutor. Both deaf and hearing residents of Nebaj share social and embodied experiences, even in the absence of shared linguistic codes.I argue that familiar, recognizable scripts or genres offer a pathway to mutual comprehension as intelligible interlocutors.

Horton_2020_Chapter_2

Nebaj is a municipio located in the Western region of the Quiche Department of Guatemala. Nebaj is the largest of three towns in the region known as the Ixil triangle, which shares its name with the local Mayan language. The municipio of Nebaj has 106,237 inhabitants (INE 2002), with approximately 70% of the population living in rural aldeas, or hamlets, surrounding Nebaj. The remaining population – over 30,000 people – reside within the bustling town of Nebaj. Ixiles have been in contact with other Maya groups since the 11th century (Colby and vanden Berghe 1969: 40), but the town was more isolated from Guatemala City and Quetzaltenango until a paved road was constructed to Nebaj in 1942 (Stoll 1993: 11)

Horton_2022_Glossa_Lex

In communities without older standardized sign languages, deaf people develop their own sign languages and strategies for communicating. These languages vary across several dimensions, including their age, their distribution within the wider spoken linguistic community, and the size of the signing community. Each of these characteristics interacts with the formal and distributional properties of the sign languages that emerge. This study concerns one property of young sign languages used in Nebaj, a community in Guatemala. Specifically, I document the degree of lexical overlap between signers who interact in small local ecologies as well as signers who are part of the same larger linguistic community but do not interact with each other directly. I use the Jaccard similarity index to quantify lexical overlap and find that signers who interact frequently have higher rates of lexical overlap than rates of lexical overlap for all signers. This adds to a growing literature that documents sign languages in diverse communicative settings and suggests that interaction is associated with different levels of lexical overlap or variation. Unique features of the communicative histories of signers of young sign languages are also discussed as factors that contribute to variable rates of lexical overlap in this community.

Horton_2024_SLS_ConvRepair

The term repair refers to strategies deployed by language users to resolve breakdowns in communication. In this study, I ask what strategies for conversational repair are deployed, and who takes responsibility for their execution, when a language is used in a small local signing ecology. I focus on signers from a single family within a larger speech community that does not use a national signed language and analyze conversations from four dyads of signers who engaged in a director-matcher referential communication task. I find that for three of the four dyads, there is a preference for restricted repairs that closely matches studies of repair in other signed and spoken languages. I also find a strong connection between participant role and repair type—with matchers more likely to use other-initiated repairs while directors produced self-repairs. The findings from this study highlight the complex relationship between participant identities and pragmatic strategies and the complicated social function of different types of repair in interaction.

Hortonetal_2023_RCSI

This article provides a cross-cultural study of language socialization through sign language in three indigenous Mesoamerican communities. We focus on what Goffman (1964) describes as ‘encounters’ or face engagements and how children learn the practices or rules of social exchange. As Goffman notes, many encounters have both ratified participants and excluded individuals, or those who are co-present but not explicitly implicated in the conversation. Cross-culturally, children may be more likely to occupy these side-participant roles and we explore whether this affects their ability to master visual practices in sign interactions. We analyse visual and tactile behaviours that have been documented in other signing communities in studies of turn-taking and social interaction (Horton & Singleton, 2022), including: visual-manual turn markers, establishing and maintaining eye gaze during signing, physically arranging participants to accommodate signing, and using eye gaze for joint attention and reference. Our analysis focuses on the relationship between visual/tactile communicative practice sand two characteristics of communities that have been linked to distinct socialization styles: participant frameworks and beliefs about language between adults and children.

HortonWaller_2024_Languages_GazePragmatics

In this study, we document the coordination of eye gaze and manual signing in a local sign language from Nebaj, Guatemala. We analyze gaze patterns in two conversations in which signers described the book Frog Where Are You to an interlocutor. The signers include a deaf child who narrated the book to a hearing interlocutor and her grandfather, who is also deaf, as he described the same book to his hearing grandson during a separate conversation. We code the two narratives for gaze target and sign type, analyzing the relationship between eye gaze and sign type as well as describing patterns in the sequencing of eye gaze targets. Both signers show a strong correlation between sign type and the direction of their eye gaze. As in previous literature, signers looked to a specialized medial space while producing signs that enact the action of characters in discourse in contrast to eye gaze patterns for non-enacting signs. Our analysis highlights both pragmatic–interactional and discursive–narrative functions of gaze. The pragmatic–interactional use of gaze primarily relates to the management of visual attention and turn-taking, while the discursive–narrative use of gaze marks the distinction between narrator and character perspective within stretches of narration.

HortonSingleton_2022_Frontiers

The task of transitioning from one interlocutor to another in conversation –taking turns – is a complex social process, but typically transpires rapidly and without incident in conversations between adults. Cross-linguistic similarities in turn timing and turn structure have led researchers to suggest that it is a core antecedent to human language and a primary driver of an innate “interaction engine.” This review focuses on studies that have tested the extent of turn timing and turn structure patterns in two areas: across language modalities and in early language development.Taken together, these two lines of research offer predictions about the development of turn-taking for children who are deaf or hard of hearing(DHH) acquiring sign languages. We introduce considerations unique to signed language development – namely the heterogenous ecologies in which signed language acquisition occurs, suggesting that more work is needed to account for the diverse circumstances of language acquisition for DHH children. We discuss differences between early sign language acquisition at home compared to later sign language acquisition at school in classroom settings, particularly in countries with national sign languages. We also compare acquisition in these settings to communities without a national sign language where DHH children acquire local sign languages. In particular, we encourage more documentation of naturalistic conversations between DHH children who sign and their caregivers,teachers, and peers. Further, we suggest that future studies should consider:visual/manual cues to turn-taking and whether they are the same or different for child or adult learners; the protracted time-course of turn-taking development in childhood, in spite of the presence of turn-taking abilities early in development; and the unique demands of language development in multi-party conversations that happen in settings like classrooms for older children versus language development at home in dyadic interactions.