New Insights Into Mouthings: Evidence From a Corpus-Based Study of Russian Sign Language.

Masha Kyuseva,Anastasia Bauer

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.779958

Masha Kyuseva, Anastasia Bauer

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.779958

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Abstract

While some aspects of mouthings have been previously investigated, many topics in the use of this cross-modal contact phenomenon in sign languages remain un(der)studied, and not much is known about mouthings in Russian Sign Language (RSL), in particular. This article examines various aspects of mouthings as these are used by native RSL signers and aims to contribute new insights into the use and origin of mouthings in this sign language. Based on novel data from the online RSL Corpus alongside additional elicited data, we describe the distribution, forms, functions and spreading patterns of mouthings. Our findings furthermore show that sign languages exhibit more extensive variation in the use of mouthings than has previously been thought. Moreover, we – thus far uniquely – describe mouthings also as a written-language-based contact phenomenon. This study has the potential to provide a better understanding of the nature of such contact-induced features as mouthings in sign languages in general and reveals a complex interplay of the modalities of signed, spoken and written languages.

Highlights

The focus of the present study is on mouthings, that is, on mouth actions that resemble the articulation of spoken language words (Boyes-Braem and Sutton-Spence, 2001)
It describes the two corpora that served as our data sources (“The Russian Sign Language Online Corpus” and “The ‘Spotthe-Difference’ Corpus”) and discusses the research questions that will be answered in the remainder of this article
Based on the corpus data described above, this paper aims to answer the following research questions: (1) Are mouthings as frequent in RSL as they are in other sign languages? Do they exhibit the same features over all types of signs? There is anecdotal evidence from Deaf RSL signers to the effect that RSL uses significantly less mouthing than do some other urban sign languages, such as DGS or NGT

Summary

Introduction

The focus of the present study is on mouthings, that is, on mouth actions that resemble the articulation of spoken language words (Boyes-Braem and Sutton-Spence, 2001). While producing the sign WATER in Russian Sign Language (RSL), the signer articulates (a part of) the Russian word voda ‘water’. These mouth actions have to be differentiated from mouth actions that have nothing to do with words from the surrounding spoken language. As an example of the latter, when producing the RSL sign CAN, the signer usually closes their mouth as if making the sound [ap] This type of mouth action is called a mouth gesture (Boyes-Braem, 2001). In the majority of their uses, they either constitute a nearly obligatory semantically empty component of a sign (as in the example CAN above), or convey an adjectival (e.g., ‘thick’ or ‘thin’) or adverbial (e.g., ‘intensely’) semantic information additional to that specified by the manual sign(s) (Crasborn et al, 2008)

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