36: Villages, gifs, and children: Researching signed languages in real-world contexts with Lynn Hou

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

Science

4.8 • 791 Ratings

🗓️ 20 September 2019

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Larger, national signed languages, like American Sign Language and British Sign Language, often have relatively well-established laboratory-based research traditions, whereas smaller signed languages, such as those found in villages with a high proportion of deaf residents, aren’t studied as much. When we look at signed languages in the context of these smaller communities, we can also think more about how to make research on larger sign languages more natural as well. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch interviews Dr Lynn Hou, an Assistant Professor of linguistics at the University of California Santa Barbara, in our first bilingual episode (ASL and English). Lina researches how signed languages are used in real-world environments, which takes her from analyzing American Sign Language in youtube videos to documenting how children learn San Juan Quiahije Chatino Sign Language (in collaboration with Hilaria Cruz, one of our previous interviewees!). We’re very excited to bring you our first bilingual episode in ASL and English! For the full experience, make sure to watch the video version of this episode at youtube.com/lingthusiasm (and check out our previous video episode on gesture in spoken language while you’re there). Check out the shownotes page to get the links mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/187829933341/lingthusiasm-episode-36-villages-gifs-and

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Lenthesiast, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics.
0:22.6	I'm Gretchen McCulloch, and I'm here with Dr. Lin Ho, who's an assistant professor of linguistics
0:26.6	at the University of California Santa Barbara, and a signer of American Sign Language.
0:31.6	But first, it's thanks to our patrons that we're able to expand the podcast into interesting new formats, like a video episode about signed languages, which is one of our most requested topics.
0:42.3	To become a patron, you can go to patreon.com slash enthusiasm. Hello, Lina, welcome.
1:02.0	Hello, happy to be here.
1:05.2	It's so nice to have you on the show.
1:07.1	So this is a question that we start with all of our guests.
1:10.2	How did you get into linguistics?
1:11.6	Whoa, that's a fascinating story if I do say so myself. Well, my parents are from Taiwan when I was about seven or perhaps six.
1:21.6	It was the first international trip that my parents had brought me on. We went to Taiwan and they are from
1:28.0	Taipei, which is the capital of Taiwan. And I thought, well, I knew deaf people were in the
1:34.4	United States and they had their own sign language, that being American sign language or ASL.
1:38.4	But my trip was the first time that I had actually witnessed another sign language. My mom went to a deaf
1:46.5	institute there and we saw sign language. And it was a sign language that wasn't quite
1:51.9	mind. And so it was Taiwan sign language. But something was quite different and I didn't
1:57.6	understand what they were saying. The deaf people were signing and I was quite fascinated.
2:01.6	So at that moment I began to realize there are different sign languages in different countries.
2:06.6	And so I began to think, hmm, maybe that's something I want to do later.
2:12.6	So I began studying various sign languages.
2:14.6	The problem is that you can't go into a library or a particular place and look at a grammar
2:21.8	that has been published.
	...

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