GM - Debbie Chen Pichler / Why tigers have stripes
GM - Debbie Chen Pichler / Why tigers have stripes
Friday September 27, Cube Day, the GM welcomes Debbie Chen Pichler, Professor of Linguistics at Gallaudet University, who will present some of her work on acquiring Sign Languages, under the title "Why tigers have stripes: Contributions of sign language research to a more comprehensive linguistic theory."
This talk begins with a brief but fateful conversation with Howard Lasnik during Debbie's final year of grad school. She'd hit a wall with her analysis of early word order in children's American Sign Language (ASL) and was starting to question the significance of her entire research project. Who cared what word orders deaf toddlers produced and how to account for them? How would the world be any better once she completed this dissertation? Howard's answer (involving tiger stripes) played a non-trivial role in Debbie ultimately remaining in the field of linguistics, where she now enjoys a fulfilling career studying sign language acquisition in a variety of learner contexts:
- Deaf children learning ASL from DEAF PARENTS
- Hearing and DDCI children learning from DEAF PARENTS
- Deaf children learning ASL from HEARING PARENTS
- HEARING PARENTS learning ASL as an L2 for their Deaf children
Debbie will present research from each of these acquisition contexts, focusing on interesting questions that emerge when we investigate familiar linguistic domains through the lens of sign languages: How do languages in different modalities interact in the mind of bilinguals? How does pervasive iconicity affect language acquisition? Does L2 learning in a different modality than one's L1 lead to unique L2 acquisition patterns? What constitutes optimal input for deaf children's signing L1 development, and can hearing novice L2 signers provide such input? Which signers count as "native signers," and is that construct still useful in communities where the frequency of hereditary deafness is vanishingly small? While sign language researchers have only recently begun tackling these big questions, many answers that have emerged so far have been surprising, important reminders that current linguistic theory's traditional reliance on spoken language research limits our understanding of how languages are organized, acquired and used.
Audience members are invited to ask about interesting phenomena they have read about in the sign linguistics literature, or speculate on how sign language data can test and refine various aspects of existing theory. Debbie will share relevant research to the extent that she can, or if she can't, she will start a list of topics that will hopefully spark many more exchanges about sign language research this semester. Come for the discussion, or if nothing else, come find out what Howard said about tiger stripes that compelled Debbie to continue pursuing linguistics!