Project description
Conversational skills in sign language: the case of turn-taking in a Balinese sign language
Taking turns in conversation is a crucial skill for a child’s linguistic development. However, little is known about how this skill develops in sign languages. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the LETITIA project investigates this question in deaf children growing up in a Balinese village where deafness is common and the local sign language, Kata Kolok, is widely used. There, children learn Kata Kolok from signing adults, providing a unique opportunity to understand how visual and spatial communication influences turn-taking development. The project will track the turn-taking development of deaf children from 1 to 4 years old and experimentally test how conversational settings impact turn-taking. Project work combines insights from social interaction, sign language linguistics and language acquisition.
Objective
The acquisition of turn-taking is pivotal to a child's pragmatic development; learning how and when to contribute and align with your interlocutor is a critical skill that enables smooth conversation. Despite extensive research on the development of turn-taking in spoken languages, we know little about how this unfolds in sign languages. Differences are likely as deaf children usually lack rich language models (ecology), and the visual-spatial nature of sign languages poses different challenges to manage visual attention (modality). To address this gap, this project investigates turn-taking development in an exceptional context: a Balinese village characterized by high incidence of deafness and widespread use of the local sign language, Kata Kolok. Here, children acquire Kata Kolok surrounded by a village of signing adults, providing an unparalleled opportunity to study how signing-rich ecologies shape turn-taking development in the visuo-spatial modality. I conduct two complementary studies: First, I follow the developmental trajectory of turn-taking of deaf children across 1-4 years, comparing their practices to turn-taking practices used by the adult signers in their community. For this, I draw on a unique interactive corpus of longitudinal naturalistic recordings of children who acquire Kata Kolok from their deaf caregivers from birth (KKCSC) and use a micro-level analysis of spontaneous conversations. Second, I use an experimental spot-the-difference task to further tease apart how conversational setting affects turn-taking, examining whether age of conversation partners (child vs adult) and number of interlocutors (two vs three or more) affect turn-taking behaviour among adult and child Kata Kolok signers. Merging threads from social interaction, sign language linguistics and language acquisition, the LETITIA project represents a paradigm shift in the study of sign language acquisition, grounding linguistic observations and analyses in real-world language use.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- humanitieslanguages and literaturelinguisticssign language
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecology
- social sciencespsychologypsycholinguistics
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
10691 Stockholm
Sweden