Grounding through the lens of backchannels in signed conversation: Cross-linguistic insights

Descripción del proyecto

Romper el silencio sobre los problemas de comunicación de las personas sordas

Las personas corregimos malentendidos cada 83 segundos, y la frecuencia es aún mayor en la interacción con el lenguaje de signos. Por lo tanto, es crucial comprender mejor cómo las personas sordas signantes logran la comprensión mutua, un proceso conocido como «enraizamiento». Sin embargo, la investigación sobre la infraestructura interaccional de las lenguas de signos sigue siendo limitada. Con el apoyo de las acciones Marie Skłodowska-Curie, el equipo del proyecto SignBACK investiga cómo las personas sordas signantes de dos lenguas de signos sin relación entre sí (la lengua de signos noruega y la lengua de signos del francés de Bélgica), establecen un entendimiento mutuo a través de canales de comunicación adicional, un mecanismo clave de enraizamiento. Para investigar este fenómeno interaccional, el equipo del proyecto emplea un vanguardista método sincrónico basado en corpus que combina el análisis cuantitativo con el cualitativo. Al documentar las lenguas de signos infrarrepresentadas, el equipo de SignBACK ofrece implicaciones vitales para el diseño curricular, la interacción persona-ordenador y la investigación clínica.

Objetivo

1 in 1000 deaf or hard-of-hearing individuals in the EU communicates in one of 31 national or regional signed languages (SLs) as their first language. Understanding how deaf signers of different SLs coordinate their interaction to build and maintain mutual understanding, known as grounding, is thus a key issue in unveiling the highly cooperative nature of human communication. However, research on the interactional infrastructure of SLs is still understudied. Combining insights from comparative linguistics, computational and conversational analysis, SignBack describes how deaf signers from two unrelated SLs, namely, Norwegian SL (NTS) and French Belgian SL (LSFB) achieve mutual understanding in conversation. To achieve this, I will analyse one core mechanism recognised for providing positive evidence of understanding in interaction, namely backchannels. This project will be the first cross-linguistic study to adopt a synchronic, corpus-based approach to SLs by combining quantitative statistical processing with a qualitative, interactional view on language to achieve a better understanding of human interaction in context. The integration of these methods across SLs will provide key insights into the interactional practices of two linguistic minorities, thereby further contributing to a more dynamic and semiotically diverse view of language. SignBack will make a major contribution to the field of (SL) linguistics by further documenting two under described SLs. It will provide vital implications to a range of domains including (i) curriculum design for SL interpreters, (ii) effective development of SL-based human-computer interaction and (iii) baselines for clinical research investigating impaired social functioning. The innovation of this project therefore lies not only in its object of study, which includes an overlooked side of linguistics but also in its cross-linguistic scope by being more socially inclusive towards two endangered linguistic minorities.