On the Reliability of the Notion of Native Signer and Its Risks.

Giorgia Zorzi,Jordina Sánchez Amat,Valentina Aristodemo,Carlo Cecchetto,Josep Quer,Charlotte Hauser,Beatrice Giustolisi,Caterina Donati

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.716554

Abstract

Who is a native signer? Since around 95% of deaf infants are born into a hearing family, deaf signers are exposed to a sign language at various moments of their life, and not only from birth. Moreover, the linguistic input they are exposed to is not always a fully fledged natural sign language. In this situation, is the notion of native signer as someone exposed to language from birth of any use? We review the results of the first large-scale cross-linguistic investigation on the effects of age of exposure to sign language. This research involved about 45 Deaf adult signers in each of three sign languages (Catalan Sign Language, French Sign Language, and Italian Sign Language). Across the three languages, participants were divided into three groups – those exposed from birth, those between 1 and 5 years of age, and those exposed between 6 and 15 years of age – and received a battery of tests designed for each language targeting various aspects of morphosyntactic competence. In particular, the tests focused on both those morphosyntactic phenomena that are known from the spoken language literature to be good detectors of language impairment or delay (i.e., wh-interrogatives and relative clauses) and on morphosyntactic phenomena that are sign language specific (i.e., role shift and directional verbs). The results showed a clear effect of being native, with significant differences across languages and tests between signers exposed to sign language from birth and those exposed in the 1st years of life. This confirms the life-long importance of language exposure from birth and the reliability of the notion of “nativeness”, at least for syntax. On the other hand, while in most domains the differences observed between populations might be differences in performance, for some specific constructions, signers belonging to the three groups may have different grammars. This latter finding challenges the generalized use of native signers’ grammar as the baseline for language description and language assessment.

Highlights

Remember that the question at stake in this paper is whether the traditional centrality that is assigned to native signers in the linguistic literature makes sense in relation to the signing populations, where native signers are a small minority, certainly not representative of the general population of signers
In this paper we provide an overview of the morphosyntactic SIGN-HUB assessment tests, a large-scale crosslinguistic study investigating comprehension across different sign languages and different syntactic phenomena to shed light on the notion of native signer
By relying on the same criteria to define native, early and late signers, the SIGN-HUB tests were able to provide new evidence that being exposed to sign language from birth has a permanent effect on language competence

Summary

Introduction

The notion of “native” user of a language has become controversial for various reasons. The linguistic profiles attested among deaf people are very diverse, and native signers, defined as deaf individuals who were born into a Deaf signing family, are only a small minority. This led many scholars to challenge the importance of this notion as a reliable criterion for language description and assessment, at least as far as sign languages are concerned. In this paper we will first discuss the controversial status of “native signers” with respect to the global population of Deaf signers, underlying that most experimental studies have not been using consistent criteria to contrast native signers from those signers who were not exposed to a sign language from birth. We will challenge the reliability of native signers’ grammar as the baseline to be used for sign language investigation and assessment

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Discussion

Conclusion