Bilingualism and Code-Blending Among Deaf ASL-English Bilinguals

Abstract

The audiologically deaf members of the American Deaf community display bilingual competence in American Sign Language (ASL) and English, although their language acquisition trajectories often involve delayed exposure to one or both languages. There is a great deal of variation in terms of production among these signers, ranging arguably from ASL-typical to productions that seem to display English influence. The latter have been treated as mixed productions, coined ‘Contact Signing’ by Lucas and Valli (Language contact in the American deaf community. Brill, San Diego, 1992), and could be representative of a type of codeswitching similar to what spoken language bilinguals produce, in which the grammars of both languages dually constrain utterances. These productions have also been referred to as ‘code-blending’ in bilingual sign language-spoken language contexts (e.g. Baker and Van den Bogaerde, in Sign Bilingualism: Language development, interaction, and maintenance in sign language contact situations. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2008), in which bilingual signers produce structures that show properties of their two grammars in parallel, or they could be more like a mixed language, in which a third grammar, distinct from both ASL and English, constrains these productions. First, we argue, based on the analysis of our corpus of naturalistic and elicited signed data collected in an all-deaf sociolinguistic environment, that there is evidence for both code-switching and code-blending, by which signers access two distinct grammars in parallel, given that English versus ASL-based language properties are partially separated into two clusters, showing corresponding correlations, in the production data from the participants in our study. Second, we argue that there are multiple possible scenarios in which signers who engage in code-switching or code-blending can make use of knowledge of more than one grammar, on a continuum of possible grammars between ASL and English.