 He graduated from the University of Mexico and then came to Rochester to work at RIT as an interpreter for several years. He wanted to continue his education and decided to go to the University of Texas at Austin and received his PhD last year. I feel a little bit like he's my academic nephew and I'm his aunt. Why would that be? Well, I wrote a letter of recommendation to graduate school for him and I sat on his committee for his dissertation. If I had been chairperson of the committee, I might be his academic mother, but since I was just on the committee, I feel like I'm his aunt. He works nearby at the University of Pittsburgh in the department of lesser taught languages and he's going to be speaking about language contact. So I'd like to introduce David Kintor Pozos. Thank you aunt Susan. Hello everyone. I am so happy to be here. It's been six years since I've been away. I left in 1996 and I think, wow, I said goodbye to Rochester and then I came to Texas where it's warm and fabulous. It was terrific. It was such a nice change and I think, wow, this summertime there is so hot. I think, maybe it's a little too warm for me, but I'm still saying goodbye to Rochester. I have friends that I like to keep in touch with, but now that I'm here back east and living in Pittsburgh, it's so much closer to Rochester. I'm able to see my friends much more often, so that's been wonderful to be here at NTID is just a great experience for me. The topic I'd like to speak about today is language contact. Language contact means when two languages are in proximity of each other, how they play with how they play with each other in their changes in grammatical and syntax. I'm sure some of you know that Clayton Valley unfortunately passed away. I believe it was Sunday or Monday of this week, which is a very sad occasion for us. Clayton Valley was one of the first pioneers of research for language contact. Clayton worked with Lucas and the two of them investigated the contact between ASL and English and how they overlap each other in different ways, but that was the very first work done in that area. Because I'm interested in that topic, I thought that I wanted to modify it. My interest was in Mexican Sign Language and American Sign Language and how the two of them interplay with each other when they're in contact. I will be talking today about various types of contact between the languages and how it is shown linguistically. I will point out various similarities and different ways that that contact between the two languages can appear. I'm going to be signing L-S-M. As you can see from the slide, I would like to explain why people are using that here in the United States. I'm sorry, you would think in the United States we use ASL, why are we concerned about L-S-M? The reason is because some deaf people have moved here from Mexico and that's the primary language that they come with. In the southwest area, Texas and Mexico, Arizona, California, we see quite a few deaf Mexicans living in large cities. People immigrate to the United States and perhaps they're working in the United States and they cross back to border Mexico where they live. Sometimes they come for their children so they'd be able to have an education. Sometimes they come into the United States to be able to shop for groceries but the point is many Mexicans are in the United States in those regions and when they are here, what language do they use? L-S-Q or L-S-M or American Sign Language. We do have many interpreters in Texas and Mexico, Arizona, the Southwest region. If, for example, someone were to go to school and they needed an interpreter for meaning like an IEP meaning, then they would come to the meeting and there would be an interpreter provided. You would have the deaf child, the mother, the principal and the mother wouldn't be able to speak English. She would be speaking Spanish, possibly be speaking English but culture would be back and forth between Spanish and English. Then we have the deaf child who signs ASL and between that you have the three language communication fiasco. The deaf student generally has spent time in Mexico with Mexican children who also know L-S-M and so they have a mixture of L-S-M and ASL in their language base. So my point in explaining all this is that L-S-M is used quite often in the United States in the South-West regions and also in other areas of the country. There are many different advocacy programs for deaf people in those areas teaching life skills, independent living skills. We know that deaf people from Mexico are here in the United States and they're trying to get services for them. Several years ago you might have heard the story about people who were exploited from Mexico who happened to be deaf. They told people that they needed help and they gathered up a group of people from Mexico. They put them all in one situation and had a particular man, a man had asked them to come help them and when he got them there he basically enslaved them and asked them to work for him in a non-voluntary way. This has happened in Chicago and South Carolina so it does happen in the Southwest but it also happens in the North and the East and the West of our entire country. So deaf Mexicans have come to many different places to find themselves in these situations so L-S-M users are now more widely spread throughout the United States in various regions. My specific reach rate, I wrote my dissertation in describing the linguistic phenomena that results from contact between L-S-M and ASL as you can see here on the screen. Now when I talk about the influences from contact what would that be? Spoken language contact for example between Spanish and English has a different characteristics that you can outline and with sign language ASL and L-S-M there is contact and the question is are those crossovers have same characteristics or are they different between the verbal and the manual language? Just as a point of interest in 1800s sign language really came across the world to help mold other sign languages. For example we know that Laurent Clark came here with Gallaudet to help build American sign language and we also know now that French sign language had an impact on Mexican sign language as well. The history of Mexican sign language and American sign language is quite similar not by the same particular man Laurent Clark but another man named Eduardo Hewitt. He was from Brazil and he came to this he worked at the schools for the deaf in Brazil and established a system of education and language then he came to Mexico city in about 1866 to share what he had learned. French language then went from French sign language on one side became American sign language as it did with Clark and Gallaudet and with him in Mexico it turned into L-S-M so the development of French and American sign language were parallel. The topic of contact between languages is something that you can discuss for hours it includes social interaction cultural norms that people bring in a variety of other elements from this list. I decided to talk about two particular features one being structural structural and the other being lexical. Lexical means the words the specific words are used so we're talking about how the signs themselves are different and how the structure of the first of all I'd like to address the structural differences phonologically a phonological parameter that you see up here on the screen means hand shape of sign it means the movement of the sign the placement of the sign the place of articulation also I can focus on syntax it's possible that that would be involved but generally it is it is emphasis the emphasis is on the phonological characteristics the next category is lexical which means the sign itself so we all know that ASL is a language and we know that LSM is a language are they completely different though is the question or are there some overlaps between the two is there a sign in one language that is so similar that it could be the same sign in another language and we have discovered that between 20 to 30 percent of the vocabulary has similar characteristics that they share for example here's the sign for enjoy in American sign language in Mexican sign language it's the same sign only letter queued with a letter well we would see it as an L but in Mexican sign language it's the sign for G I'm sure you're well aware of these three characteristics of the parameters of sign formation the majors are phonological the major phonological parameters are hand shape place articulation and movement we also have minor characteristics this is from 1979 from clima and belugy two researchers from california who went to the salk institute and did lots of research and studies they really focused on the three major and the three minor categories of parameter one example of a minor parameter would be the palm orientation which way the palm is facing when the sign is produced for this too for the example of enjoy both in LSM and ASL means it's to the hand shape and also whether or not used two hands or one hand but the movement is the same the location is the same so the question is does it adhere to the system and it would be called similarly articulated sign because almost all the parameters are the same so that would be example of the 20 to 30 percent of the shared signs that I just spoke of so whether I use it and if the movement was different then it would not have been called a similar similarly articulated sign but because it adheres to the major parameters it is included in that group there needs to be at least two parameters for it to fit in the major category the locations for data collection we near the texas border one was alpaso texas and the other area is called the really it's the real ground valley but most people just call it the valley now there were several towns involved in this portion of the study I don't know if you are aware of this if you've been there or not but if you haven't this is what we're talking that's where alpaso is located rs is located directly below alpaso warris has a very very big deaf population so that warris and alpaso are very very close to each other so there's quite a condensed population there this is the valley that I was just mentioning it is quite a distance from alpaso it's about a 10 hour drive by car from the valley up to alpaso so it's quite a giant texas recall is a huge state just like california it's quite a distance from one end to the other left our research information people involved in the research study were all deaf participants there were four in each area for a total of eight in each area we decided to have the same requirements for for each we had people who were bilingual two of them were bilingual and could close code switch back and forth one was born in mexico grew up in mexico moved to the united states another was born here in the united states grew up in the united states but went to mexico quite frequently and was able to learn and make friends and associate with mexican people and is a very very strong lsm user so those two people were bilingual the next person involved was a completely dominant lsm user and the fourth was a completely dominant asl user and the reason i did this was because i wanted to know how everyday communication would look if everyone was completely bilingual we wouldn't have an accurate example of representation because if everyone can code switch then you aren't going to see where the similarities and differences lie in the language basis let me explain the research process we had one-on-one interviews keep in mind that there were the two deaf bilingual people as i said the how the four people in el paso and their strengths and their requirements were the same as the people in the valley the bilingual people would conduct the interview we'd have four people in the room and they would be talking about a variety of different topics let me start by saying this way an interviewer would say where are you from where did you grow up are you from here are you from mexico give a variety of questions that were background related to the deaf person the deaf person would answer that we would have before in the room and discuss some trivial topic like for example in mexico they talk about eating tortillas tortillas can't either be corn or flour now at least that was my experience growing up i generally ate flour other people had different experiences did you eat corn did you eat flour so that was the kind of things that they would just discuss another question they might chat about was again would you prefer corn or or i really like corn because so what we try and do is elicit feedback from the people about questions that they knew absolutely everything about you didn't want to ask a question where they would say i don't know you wanted to elicit information so to do that you need to talk about something that they're very familiar with so people would get talking about how their mothers cooked different things which one was better than the other so it was a great natural communication that was occurring with the four people this is how the room was set up i think in the corner you can see is the video camera you can see it looks like a triangular or a four shape four sided shaped object then i the researcher would be sitting back in the corner and maybe feeds and information or some questions to somebody and sometimes i would say for example ask about where they grew up interviewer would say you grew up where and then they'd start the conversation but the deaf person changed my question lexically so it was consistent with the language is used in the group sometimes they would turn to me and say are you ready for the next question and we check back with each other and then the interviewer would start again with the questioning of the group so basically what i did was just paste the question after we videotaped these sessions we collected all the data and then we went back to austin texas and tried to code all of the sign usage we saw in the videotape at first when i began looking at the videotapes i decided i needed to establish categories for various things obviously the first thing would be signs for example back to the sign enjoy that was something that i recognized quite quickly as an asl sign this sign which looks like tree or the sign that looks like mother or the sign that looks like father those are all signs that are distinct that i put into a category the next category was fingerspelling which falls logically after that then the next bank had classifiers for example if a person was talking about a man and they used the one index hand shape that would be a classifier and the thing is you should try and find out is it a classifier based on asl or lsn but i decided to group all of those types of movements into classifiers the next is pointing movements for anything any language people point to point to a person as a pronoun or they point to a place as an absent reference for example stores over there or in the corner over there and then it's held in space the next is gestures this was a really interesting category that i'd like to get into a little bit later but i had a time difficult time trying to figure out if something was actually a gesture or a sign and that's something i'll discuss more in a minute unsure meant i didn't know what it was i had no idea what they were doing i had a deaf person serve as a coder and we worked together and going through each of the items so we refer to each other when we weren't sure what it was i had 6477 this is the graph of the results are the signs whether it be asl or lsn or sometimes we would have similar similarly articulated signs that we would put in it like i said the sign for enjoy in the sign that's similar to that in lsn also pointing was quite a large category was it smaller unit gestures was a little bit of a bigger unit but obviously pointing in signs were the major breakdowns a minute and just discussed my findings and one of the things i'd like to talk about is interference there are different types of interference one being phonological and the other using non-manual signals nms which means a raised eyebrow or lowered eyebrows body's shoes or the head being tilted back or forward i'll get into that next part would be lexical differences the signs themselves being completely different for example the asl sign for family and the mexican sign is family which are very distinct differences in the sign so that would be an example of lexical we can also see that deaf people of course code switch back and forth when it comes to numbers and then asl are very different and i'll give you examples of these as we go through it and i can go through and show you the differences deaf people sometimes use a special way of indicating numbers a heist is a linguist linguist who has written about interference and this is a clip uh a excerpt from his work if a person for example grew up speaking only english and another person grew up speaking another language and the person speaking english decided they wanted to learn the secondary language and they took a course in it like for example french so they would struggle trying to learn the french pronunciation of words and eventually they would probably do relatively well the english because it was something you were a native speaker of of course interfered with their productions of french language so the syntax and the structure might be interfered with along with the phonological and back to the lexical portion meaning the interference can be the word or the sign that would interfere let me give you an example of interference related to sound based languages we have t the sound t like table travel slavic languages for example russian polish ukrainian those slavic languages also have the t sound in their language but the sound of their of the t is slightly different if i was talking about if i was trying to explain this i would show you where their tongue and their teeth go to produce the letter in slavic languages the back of the tongue rests on the teeth and in english it it's on the avila ridge the tongue was on the avila ridge to make the t sound so they're both saying t but the sounds are slightly different because of the placement of the tongue so if i'm speaking english and i go to a slavic country for example russia when i try to learn russian i might have a difficult time pronouncing the t sound because although it's generally the same the production is going to be different and so therefore that sound will interfere with my production of the logical interferences for example hand shape everyone knows the sign for f and asl which is this this is a sign for s and lsm obviously you can see the french roots in both languages asl modified lsm stuck with the original french hand shape which you can see produced here but english or american sign which is modified to make the thumb go to the end of the finger again the asl sign for family some deaf people say family but they have the f hand shape in lsm even though they're using the american sign some deaf people say family using the lsm sign but the hand shape is an asl hand shape so you see interferences there and that's an example where the hand shape is the primary focus of the interference fingerspelling for example if the deaf they are f a i r sometimes they use the lsm f and then continue to spell an american i a r a person might have grown up in mexico and they have that native that natural instinct to use the f hand shape as they were used to in mexico as opposed to modifying it in american sign language other phonological interferences are in a place of articulation like for example in asl the sign for light is produced like this lsm this is the sign with this hand shape it's the l hand shape deaf person signed one time this yes does asl ever use the lips no we use the chin we use maybe the nose but you place a articulation in asl it's never on the lips but in lsm it is grammatically correct so i've seen those type of errors or interference the next example is with poem orientation i have to explain the differences between lsm and asl for this example you've heard the sentence mind your p's and q's meaning watch out you have to pay attention you have to do everything the right way i kind of modified it mind your p's and gays in american sign language you're familiar with the letter p and the letter k in lsm the letter p is produced like this which is the same as our letter k and the sign for k starts with the hand shape with the poem orientation down and then most facing front and p are actually the same signed but they hold different meanings an example for this would be the word pen this is how you would spell it p in the lsm form and then en from american sign language and of course you understand it from context but if you don't have that it looks like ken like the ken doll or what is it you're not even which is not silly but it's true because the k and the p come from different language bases and that's an example of the interference with the contact between the two if you were talking about wh questions he has no questions topic comment or for a variety of reasons we use non-manual signals if you were to play kills attention to a person's mouth you will find the adverbial form in the adjective form lsm if you were to ask a wh question would be different than you would expect in asl in asl you have furrowed brows that go down in lsm your neck goes back and your head moves back like komo for example means how in lsm you sign it this way it means when it's how you sign it in american sign language we have the opposite your head comes forward and your brows are furrowed and it's interesting to see how some deaf people use signs that are mixed like they use the non-manual signals from asl with a with a mexican sign i can't do it the other way i have no idea i'm trying to do it it's not working it's tough um wait let's see if i can do this head back out there that's the lsm non-manual with the with the american sign which is really tough for me to do i can't do it this way it's interesting to see this mixture of the two languages being used you can obviously see the non-manual signals but you can also see they get pretty adept at using mixing the two languages there's another example of mouthing within the sign language there are different types of mouth movements for example if i sign an english sentence i would say hello my name is david pozos and i am going to a school blah blah blah so you can read that up my mouth some signs have their own non-manual mouth movements that are attached to the sign for example if you say finish you don't say the word have completely you say with with your mouth or you say finish there's different have the word the non-manual movement for have is attached to the sign so as the users are used to this and lsm users have their own way of doing that no no no and lsm the sign for have is their sign is produced the sign for lsm is produced like this but they still use sometimes the non-manual signal from english the mouthing is valid from sign language from american sign language and you'll see the same idea um with american sign language you'll see the word that means equal equal or the same and so you'll see same on the mouth with this sign that means equal or same wait a minute again i'm kind of so you'll see the sign for same but the mouth movement from the spanish word equal so the sign will be the american sign language same the mouth movement is the spanish equal so this is an example of interference between the two languages now i can give you a lot of examples of phonological differences and influences but now i'd like to talk about some lexical differences and influences some deaf in the group code switched between asl and lsm fluently um the people who knew asl tend to stay with asl but some would code switch if the interviewers signed lsm and seemed to depend on that totally uh when that person got into the group we would notice them doing a lot of code switching so code switching happened for a variety of reasons the person who had strong lsm in communicating with a strong bilingual um would find themselves code switching to match what the bilingual person was doing and they would use possibly an asl sign uh to back up the lsm sign they were using also related to lexical items remember we were talking about numbers and how different they are in lsm these are the numbers one two three four five oh i'm sorry that was asl in lsm one two three four five pretty similar up until five in asl six lsm six seven eight i feel like i'm trying to pat my head and rub my belly at the same time 15 is two handed in lsm 16 in asl and lsm 17 18 and 20 notice they're kind of similar but a little different between the two languages the number 20 but in total they're quite different deaf people struggled with these these two very different number systems seems that they develop different strategies to make themselves clear like for the number 16 for example they would do one six so they would do two separate numbers for 16 one six instead of 16 that was one strategy that was developed it was really hard for them to communicate numbers to one another or sometimes when they were given the number in lsm then they would back it up with the same number in asl to make it clear it's really hard though when they were trying to communicate numbers with one another and they would use a variety of ways to make sure it was clear remember when we were categorizing things the signing the pointing the classifiers well one category of sign the signs and i'd like to focus on the sign category right now there were close to four thousand signs that were used in the samples we collected and that represented 62 of the data what were the different types of signs that were used in asl the sign for family and lsm the sign for family okay they would use those signs and they were totally different another category were similarly articulated signs like the signs for enjoy and the only difference was one phonological parameter if there were two phonological parameters different then they were considered totally different signs other signs looked the same but had different meanings for example in asl this sign means english or england that sign in sml means amigo or friend it's the exact same form but very different meaning sasu means same form but different meaning some signs had the same form but the meaning was close for example this sign in asl means not in lsm that same sign means nada which is nothing so the meanings are similar but not exactly the same the example i gave before of english and friend they were exactly the same sign but had very different meanings here we're talking about the same sign that has a similar but different meaning if a deaf person used an sasu it seemed as though the group all of the different language users would understand it but one time that didn't happen the discussion was oh i think it was during a one-on-one interview and the question was asked where did you learn english and the response was i learned english over there and so it was actually that he had learned english from his friend you know and so it was really hard to figure out what they meant but most of the time they were able to communicate with each other without much trouble sometimes we had to clarify and ask a person what they meant do you mean this and then get a response from them finish talking about the various categories of signs and want to talk about another interesting factor as we looked at all of the data the pointing the signs the gestures now we had to determine what we meant by gestures here in the u.s as people speak they tend to use gestures this thumbs up sign is a gesture it has meaning i mean hearing people use it everyone uses it it has a set meaning and people generally know what that means and we use it in sign language too or like this f hand shape we use it so now do we classify that as a sign or a gesture is it a gesture that's become formalized and now is a sign well we'll hold on to that for a minute but there are a lot of gestures that people use and they use repeatedly like this thumbs up gesture or like the come here gesture so as we looked at this category of gestures and we looked at all of the data i just discussed the similarly articulated signs and now when we looked in mexican sign language and american sign language we saw that they both existed but that was pretty clear i mean you're either talking about a person or a place it was fairly clear gestures in the united states and mexico they were fairly clear to understand when josh people when deaf people pantomimed something it wouldn't matter if they grew up in mexico or in the united states they still seem to pantomime or gesture things in similar ways and that represented about 50 percent of the data being less than 50 percent were signs that were different less than 50 percent of the signs were totally different it didn't matter if they were strong lsm users or so many signs that are similarly articulated pointed to or gestureed that the communication was relatively clear 50 percent of the time the other 50 percent were distinctly unique different lexican signs that were used in each language now i'd like to talk about the 20 percent of the total data which was the similarly articulated signs that's the thing and that's the thing that's between 20 to 30 35 percent that i mentioned earlier and that's where lsm and asl have some some overlap in the gesture category it was 13 percent of the total data pointing category was 20 percent so if you add all those up it equals about 50 percent so keep in mind that asl and lsm are phonologically different there are some phonological differences syntax aside we aren't talking about syntax right now but there are some varieties within the signs but if you were to collect all that data and look at it it seems as though the two languages have quite a lot of commonalities where you can understand each other between the two like recently the phonological and lexical discussions have been between spoken languages for example if we were to talk about spoken english and spoken spanish the contact area that they were studying would be the same you would talk about the sounds the influences of the word choices the borrowed uses of the the borrowed words that would be in each spoken language and the codes wishing that would occur so everything that we've talked about today mirrors the studies that have been done in the past with spoken languages like for example in montreal they've studied french and english and the creole and the contact between them but one interesting point that we noticed is that there are things that look the same or things that deaf people will understand regardless of whether or not they grew up in the us or mexico and those in those parts of the language equal about 50 to figure out more specifics would require a lot of research for example the gesture system and all that that entails would require quite a bit to find out what it is about the gestures that both language users understand so easily so the contact between signed languages mirrors the results with spoken languages with some unique differences i would like to uh thank the people who supported me with their grant and thank you for your attention today