(Salle F05)
Van Deusen Phillips, Sarah
Tara, Massimino
University of Chicago, Chicago
Speaking Bodies : Social Values as Expressed
by Two Spanish Homesigners
Language acquisition infl uences how children come to conceptualize
and negotiate the social world into which they are born, but what happens
when children don’t have access to the language spoken around
them ? By joining a growing body of gesture research in psychology with
ethnographic material, this project calls for a broadened formal understanding
of linguistic performance as both spoken and embodied, specifi
cally by identifying locally-specifi c nonverbal communication styles
that may infl uence how children learn to conceptualize the world around
them when they have incomplete access to a conventional language. We
know that adult communicative performance (conversation, narrative,
etc.) plays a key role in the socialization and maintenance of beliefs
and values from one generation to the next. But an unspoken assumption
in socialization research is that in order for children to benefi t
from exposure to values expressed in everyday talk, they must have
access to a shared language. This project challenges that assumption
by examining the communicative structure and content of two orally
educated deaf children in Spain who use homesign to communicate with
their hearing families. We demonstrate how they access and convey values
and norms traditionally assumed to be learned through language
socialization by comparing their language activities in homesign with
the speech-accompanying gestures that their parents use when speaking
to them and engaging them in co-constructed discourse. These results
are situated against previous fi ndings that demonstrate the American
and Taiwanese homesigners incorporate culturally specifi c values for
personhood in homesigned discourse despite their isolation from a conventional
language model. Therefore, all children, hearing or deaf, may
take advantage of multiply encoded meanings-spoken or not-to enter
their community’s meaning systems and to adopt local discursive norms
for constructing experience and personhood.
