To be seen and/or heard: audience design in bimodal bilingual families

ABSTRACT

Families with deaf parents and hearing children often demonstrate bimodal bilingualism, using both a signed and a spoken language. This study uses an audience design framework to analyze the home language use of two bimodal bilingual families in the United States. The school-age children in these families appeared to design their utterances for reception by their addressees while using as much speech as possible. All of the children demonstrated fluency in both American Sign Language and spoken English, and parent–child communication was generally easy and clear. The children typically signed to their parents, but the children in one family often included simultaneous speech when addressing the parent with the greatest receptive abilities for speech. They generally used only speech to address their siblings, leaving parents who were present to either request a translation or accept a degree of exclusion. However, in each family, the oldest child sometimes accommodated to the presence of a deaf parent by including signs with his speech to his brothers. Despite the parents’ institution of family language policies meant to encourage the use of sign, the children’s behavior reflected the sociolinguistic dominance of spoken English in the wider society.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingualism
• sign language
• code switching
• families
• parent child interaction
• siblings

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the participating families for making this research possible. Thanks also to Richard P. Meier, Keith Walters, Jilly Kowalsky, and Niall Cook for your help on this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The fifth session was scheduled with family 1 because the previous sessions had not included episodes with all family members present at once. The full desired variety of participant configurations was obtained in only four sessions with family 2.

2 This use of the turn as the unit of analysis for code choice is similar to the methods of Vihman (1998).

3 The father in family 1 was recorded with the two older children only at the dinner episode, during which they exchanged 10 or fewer turns apiece: too few for reasonable quantitative analysis. These exchanges are therefore excluded from both Figures 1 and 5.

4 Transcription conventions: Signs are represented in small caps. If signs were produced simultaneously with speech, they are represented underneath the transcription of the corresponding speech, and the words that were produced at the same time are underlined. Words produced with an unusual voice quality are typed in italics, preceded by a description in (parentheses).

5 Excerpts from the interviews were translated from ASL by the author in consultation with a certified ASL interpreter.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ginger Pizer

Dr. Ginger Pizer is an Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English at Mississippi State University. Her primary research interests involve the interaction of spoken language with signed language or gesture, particularly in family contexts.