Brazilian Bimodal Bilinguals as Heritage Signers

Ronice Quadros,Diane Lillo-Martin

doi:10.3390/languages3030032

Ronice Quadros, Diane Lillo-Martin

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/languages3030032

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Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of heritage signers: bimodal bilinguals, who are adult hearing children of Deaf parents who acquired sign language at home with their parents and the spoken language from the surrounding community. Analyzing heritage language with bimodal bilinguals who possess pairs of languages in different modalities provides a new kind of evidence for understanding the heritage language phenomenon as well as for theoretical issues regarding human language. Language production data were collected from four Brazilian bimodal bilinguals separately in both sign and speech, as well as from monolingual comparison Deaf signers and hearing speakers. The data were subsequently analyzed for various grammatical components. As with other types of heritage speakers, we observed a great degree of individual variation in the sign (heritage) language of balanced participants who patterned similarly to the monolingual signers, compared to those whose use of sign language differed greatly from monolinguals. One participant showed some weaknesses in the second (spoken) language. We approach the variation in language fluency in the two languages by considering the different contexts of language development and continuing use.

Highlights

IntroductionHeritage language: The Case of Hearing Children of Deaf ParentsThis paper focuses on the language use of hearing adult children of Deaf parents in Brazil.Children of Deaf adults—known as Codas—who are not deaf themselves may be said to acquire a sign language as a heritage language (Compton 2014; Palmer 2015; Pichler et al 2017; Reynolds2016)
Heritage language: The Case of Hearing Children of Deaf ParentsThis paper focuses on the language use of hearing adult children of Deaf1 parents in Brazil.Children of Deaf adults—known as Codas—who are not deaf themselves may be said to acquire a sign language as a heritage language (Compton 2014; Palmer 2015; Pichler et al 2017; Reynolds2016)
For the bimodal bilinguals, the table provides the percentage of verbs produced with ungrammatical morphology in Libras

Summary

Introduction

Heritage language: The Case of Hearing Children of Deaf ParentsThis paper focuses on the language use of hearing adult children of Deaf parents in Brazil.Children of Deaf adults—known as Codas—who are not deaf themselves may be said to acquire a sign language as a heritage language (Compton 2014; Palmer 2015; Pichler et al 2017; Reynolds2016). Heritage language: The Case of Hearing Children of Deaf Parents. This paper focuses on the language use of hearing adult children of Deaf parents in Brazil. 132) define “heritage speakers” as, typically, second-generation immigrants who live in bilingual contexts. In this case, the heritage language is the language the children are first exposed to at home, before subsequently becoming dominant in the language of the broader society in which they live. In Brazil, for instance, where Brazilian Portuguese (BP) is the dominant societal language, any other language used in a specific community may be considered a heritage language including immigrant, ethnic and sign language communities. In the United States, immigrant (and colonial) languages, as well as ethnic (Fishman 2001) and sign languages, are considered heritage languages in an English-dominant

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