Synthesis of sign and speech in a New Zealand Sign Language-target session: Oral channel variation of hearing bimodal bilingual children of Deaf parents

<p>This thesis investigates the uniquely “bimodal” bilingual language production of some of the New Zealand Deaf community’s youngest members—hearing and cochlear-implanted Deaf children who have Deaf signing parents. These bimodal bilinguals (aged 4-9 years old) are native users of two typologically different languages (New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) and English), and two modalities (visual-manual and auditory-oral). The primary focus of this study is the variation found in the oral channel produced by these bimodal bilingual children, during a sign-target session (i.e. a signed conversation with a Deaf interlocutor), involving a game designed to elicit location and motion descriptions alongside a sociolinguistic interview. The findings of this study are three-fold. Firstly, the variation of audible and visual volumes of the oral channel (the spoken modality) between and within participants’ language sessions is described. Notably, audible volume ranges from voiceless, whispered, and fully-voiced productions. Audible volume is found to have an inverse relationship with visual volume, in that reduced auditory cues reflect an increase in visual cues used for clarification. Additionally, a lowered audible volume (whispers or voiceless mouthings) is associated with reduced English, aligning with some NZSL grammatical structures, while full-voice is associated with intact English grammatical structures. Transfer in the opposite direction is also evident during descriptions of a motion event, in that English structures for encoding ‘path’ surface in the manual channel (the signed modality). Bidirectional transfer also occurs simultaneously, where structures of both languages surface in both linguistic channels. Secondly, the coordination of the oral and manual channels during descriptions of location and motion is described. Notably, the linguistic channels are tightly temporally synchronised in the coordination of meaning. The oral channel can function gesturally by modifying or emphasising meaning in the manual channel; a similar function to co-speech gesture used by hearing users of spoken languages. Thirdly, this thesis details the children’s attitudes towards their use of NZSL and English, highlighting their sensitivity to the uniqueness of their heritage language, the movement between Deaf and hearing worlds and associated languages, and their role in passing on their sign language to other hearing people. Their Deaf/Coda and hearing cultural identification is found to be entangled in use of both oral and manual channels. The oral channel is multifaceted in the ways it functions for both the bimodal bilingual child and their Deaf interlocutor, and thus operates at the intersection of language, cognition and culture. Bimodal bilinguals’ use of the oral channel is influenced by the contact situation that exists between Deaf and hearing communities, the cognitive cost of language suppression, and the interactional setting. This study contributes to growing global research conducted on the language production of bimodal bilinguals. It provides preliminary insight into oral channel features of young native NZSL users as a way of better understanding bimodal bilingual language development, the connections between audiological status and language, the interplay of codes across linguistic channels, and the role that modality plays in shaping meaning across all human languages.</p>

Synthesis of sign and speech in a New Zealand Sign Language-target session: Oral channel variation of hearing bimodal bilingual children of Deaf parents

<p>This thesis investigates the uniquely “bimodal” bilingual language production of some of the New Zealand Deaf community’s youngest members—hearing and cochlear-implanted Deaf children who have Deaf signing parents. These bimodal bilinguals (aged 4-9 years old) are native users of two typologically different languages (New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) and English), and two modalities (visual-manual and auditory-oral). The primary focus of this study is the variation found in the oral channel produced by these bimodal bilingual children, during a sign-target session (i.e. a signed conversation with a Deaf interlocutor), involving a game designed to elicit location and motion descriptions alongside a sociolinguistic interview. The findings of this study are three-fold. Firstly, the variation of audible and visual volumes of the oral channel (the spoken modality) between and within participants’ language sessions is described. Notably, audible volume ranges from voiceless, whispered, and fully-voiced productions. Audible volume is found to have an inverse relationship with visual volume, in that reduced auditory cues reflect an increase in visual cues used for clarification. Additionally, a lowered audible volume (whispers or voiceless mouthings) is associated with reduced English, aligning with some NZSL grammatical structures, while full-voice is associated with intact English grammatical structures. Transfer in the opposite direction is also evident during descriptions of a motion event, in that English structures for encoding ‘path’ surface in the manual channel (the signed modality). Bidirectional transfer also occurs simultaneously, where structures of both languages surface in both linguistic channels. Secondly, the coordination of the oral and manual channels during descriptions of location and motion is described. Notably, the linguistic channels are tightly temporally synchronised in the coordination of meaning. The oral channel can function gesturally by modifying or emphasising meaning in the manual channel; a similar function to co-speech gesture used by hearing users of spoken languages. Thirdly, this thesis details the children’s attitudes towards their use of NZSL and English, highlighting their sensitivity to the uniqueness of their heritage language, the movement between Deaf and hearing worlds and associated languages, and their role in passing on their sign language to other hearing people. Their Deaf/Coda and hearing cultural identification is found to be entangled in use of both oral and manual channels. The oral channel is multifaceted in the ways it functions for both the bimodal bilingual child and their Deaf interlocutor, and thus operates at the intersection of language, cognition and culture. Bimodal bilinguals’ use of the oral channel is influenced by the contact situation that exists between Deaf and hearing communities, the cognitive cost of language suppression, and the interactional setting. This study contributes to growing global research conducted on the language production of bimodal bilinguals. It provides preliminary insight into oral channel features of young native NZSL users as a way of better understanding bimodal bilingual language development, the connections between audiological status and language, the interplay of codes across linguistic channels, and the role that modality plays in shaping meaning across all human languages.</p>

Using Children’s Literature to Teach the 4Cs of CLIL: A Systematic Review of EFL Studies

This systematic review examines whether the use of children’s literature in EFL classrooms supports the 4Cs of CLIL—content, communication, cognition, and culture. Previous research has shown many benefits for using children’s literature in English-dominant classroom settings, but it seems little attention has been given to its use in EFL contexts and no attention in CLIL. This study utilizes a systematic search strategy to collect and synthesize current research on children’s literature use in EFL settings in order to better understand how children’s literature may impact EFL student learning and, specifically, examine whether its use can meet the 4Cs of CLIL. Records from four databases were screened for studies using children’s literature in EFL settings, resulting in the inclusion of 15 articles. The analysis of the articles reveals that current research shows evidence that the use of children’s literature can help facilitate student learning in content, communication, cognition, and culture. However, despite this clear connection to the goals of CLIL, investigations on children’s literature remain absent from CLIL research. We believe this research lends support for the use of children’s literature in the CLIL classroom and calls for more attention, both by practitioners and researchers, toward the use of children’s literature in CLIL classrooms.

Ecological and psychological factors in the cultural evolution of music

The two target articles agree that processes of cultural evolution generate richness and diversity in music, but neither address this question in a focused way. We sketch one way to proceed – and hence suggest how the target articles differ not only in empirical claims, but also in their tacit, prior assumptions about the relationship between cognition and culture.

Metaphor as the refection of culture determined cognition

The article belongs to the cognitive dimension of contemporary cognitive linguistics based on the idea that the processes of the world conceptualization take place in the context of a certain culture and language imparting culturally determined character to our cognition. The ethnocultural specificity of cognition has various forms of manifestation in language, the most explicit of which is metaphor because the very nature of our thinking is metaphorical and reflects the correspondence with experience which is also culture-specific. The study aims to investigate how culturally determined cognition finds its manifestation in metaphor. The main goal of the article is to point out and characterize the forms of manifestation of ethnocultural specificity of metaphor in the text. The analysis is based on a corpus of 860 metaphorical expressions obtained from 34 English-language fiction texts. The main methods of analysis are conceptual, comparative-culturological and contextual analyses. The introduction contains a short survey of theoretical works related to the interaction of language, cognition and culture and describes the way methods are applied. In the second part the author analyses the interrelations between three branches of linguistics: ethnolinguistics, linguoculturology, and cultural linguistics united on the basis of their interest in the study of language in the cultural aspect. The main body of the article presents the analysis of metaphor in the aspect of culture specific cognition which results in the identification of three forms of representing the culturally determined cognition in metaphor: 1) the degree of metaphorical density of the text and the manner of metaphorical representation from the perspective of explicitness/implicitness; 2) the specificity of conceptual spheres which serve as the source of metaphors; 3) the choice of objects of metaphorical description determined by the sociocultural conventions of a linguocultural society. By way of conclusion, the author outlines the prospects of metaphor studies in the aspect of culture specific cognition.

Narrative as cultural representation

This paper addresses issues related to narrative, cognition, and culture within the framework of foreign- or second-language (L2) narrative discourse, using a methodology of connecting the story- and language-related qualities of narrative discourse. The term “coherence” refers to whether or not a text makes sense at a global level, whereas “cohesion” describes the linguistic relationships among clauses in a narrative, such as how its surface linguistic elements are linked together at a local level. The paper (1) examines oral narratives, (2) reveals how both coherence and cohesion serve as the twin engines of narrative, and (3) emphasizes the significance of noting not only the narrative content/structure but also the appropriate use of linguistic devices, to identify language-specific ways of expressing affective elements in narrative. That is, the paper suggests the importance of developing conceptual understanding of L2 forms (e.g., grammatical variables) and their stylistic significance.

A cognitive approach to the conceptual metaphors in Shi Jing (The Book of Poetry)

This is a cognitive linguistic study of Shi Jing (The Book of Poetry), the first collection of poems in Chinese history dated from the 11th to the 6th century B.C. Adopting the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, we carry out a comprehensive analysis of all the metaphorical expressions in the collection, with the aim of investigating the underlying conceptual metaphors and exploring the interrelationships between metaphor, cognition and culture. The main findings are: 1) Altogether 476 metaphorical expressions have been identified, not only in those poems traditionally associated with bĭ (comparison) or xìng (affective image), but also in those poems traditionally associated with fù (narration). 2) Most of the metaphorical expressions identified belong to the Great Chain of Being Metaphor and can be further divided into downward ones and upward ones, with the former outnumbering the latter. 3) From the underlying conceptual metaphors, it can be observed that the conceptualization pattern of the Zhou Dynasty is rather anthropocentric and anthropomorphic, with a certain tendency towards animism. It is also patriarchal in regarding men as aesthetic subject and women as aesthetic object. 4) The Zhou people also showed remarkable figurative creativity. All the four devices summarized by Lakoff and Turner (1989) for creating novel language from conventional materials (extending, elaborating, questioning and composing) have been skillfully employed by the Zhou people to sing for their love and lament the miseries of life.