Variation in the use of mouthing in British Sign Language – a comparison of four bilingual groups.
The term ‘mouthing’ refers to the full or partial articulation of the spoken word (usually voiceless) by the signer when simultaneously producing lexical items in a signed language and are derived from a spoken language (Sutton-Spence & Boyes-Braem, 2001). Mouthings are sometimes referred to as ‘spoken components’ or ‘word pictures’ and have been reported to co-occur most frequently with nouns and morphologically simple verbs in a number of signed languages (Schermer 1990; Engberg-Pedersen, 1993; Nadolsk & Rosenstein, 2007). Sociolinguistic variation has been identified as a factor which may determine the number of mouthings used by different participant groups (Lucas & Valli 1992). In particular a signer’s linguistic background has been reported to influence the frequency of mouthings. Results suggest deaf people who have acquired sign language from birth use fewer mouthings than deaf people from hearing families and who were late learners of sign language. (Sutton-Spence & Day 2001, Keller 2001).
This paper compares the frequency and form of mouthing used by four groups of bilingual signers (deaf native signers, deaf non-native signers, hearing native signer interpreters and hearing non-native signer interpreters).
This study looks at data elicited from narratives (picture stories, English text and spontaneous stories) and a structured discussion with a deaf native signer. Firstly the linguistic background of each group and results from language tests will be described. Following this a summary of the findings from the analyses will be given concentrating on the grammatical class of the mouthings and manual signs.
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