OTROS DATOS DE INTERÉS

All levels of this study will use Ariel’s (1988, 1990) framework, which was also adapted for use by Morgan (2006), Frederiksen and Mayberry (2015, 2016) and Perniss and Özyürek (2015) for their research on referring expressions in British Sign Language (BSL), ASL, and German Sign Language/Turkish Sign Language respectively. These studies have contributed to important considerations about REs in signed languages, however, each has considered the system of REs in ways that do not always take into account the full inventory of options available to signed languages. To our knowledge, no studies have extensively explored co-occurring REs within a system of referring.

Additionally, we are not aware of any formal studies that have researched the degree to which ASL users purposively shift their deployment of REs to satisfy audiences with greater or lesser access to or familiarity with the same content. As a result, many questions remain about how modality and context factor into the use of REs in ASL.

1.2.1 Study One (Article One)

The first component of the study will analyze ASL narrative samples from 19 Deaf adults with native language skills2_{. The narratives are all based on the same 6-panel}

picture stimulus (Balloon Story, see Section 1.5, Figure 4). The data used for this study provides an ideal context for analysis in that the common stimulus includes five

competing referents, including three human, male characters and two inanimate entities. This study will ask five key questions:

2 _{All native users are defined as Deaf children of Deaf parents. Most subjects were 3}rd _generation

1. Can we replicate the findings of comprehensive research on REs in ASL (F&M) if we include a broader subset of REs from a narrative sample? Are the

relationships that previous research describes robust enough to be maintained with this wider inventory of REs?

2. Is the inventory of referring expressions as identified in the current literature extensive enough to characterize the range of referring options available in ASL as evidenced in this corpus of narrative retellings? Do the conclusions of this study align with proposed models for ASL?

3. How are REs used to signal various discourse statuses (introduced, maintained, reintroduced) in ASL, as evidenced in this sample of narrative retellings? Do our results support the research to date?

4. Does the use of a system for calculating accessibility scores (Toole 1996) better inform a hierarchy of accessibility?

5. Do the patterns that emerge in the analysis of ASL inform new ideas about the notion of accessibility, or can the findings be subsumed under the frameworks proposed for discourse accessibility phenomena in spoken and signed languages?

1.2.2. Study Two (Article Two)

Research on REs in ASL has not fully considered the implications for those REs that include reference to several concurrent entities. Because ASL can leverage its visual-spatial architecture in addition to using multiple articulators (hands, body, eye- gaze, head), many entities can be represented simultaneously (Liddell, 2003; Liddell & Vogt-Svendsen, 2007; Poizner, 1983; Vermeerbergen, et al., 2007; Cormier et al., 2013;

Dudis, 2004). This second study will explore how forms that include simultaneous referents (constellations) function differently than those REs that occur in isolation in order to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of the system of REs in a visual- spatial modality. This study will ask the following key questions:

1. Do all RE types documented in isolation (from Study 1) emerge in constellations?

Conversely, are all RE types that emerge in constellations included in the isolation data?

2. If there are REs that occur in both environments, do they occur in equal

frequencies?

3. Do all RE types that occur in both environments demonstrate the same allocations

across discourse statuses? Are there differences in the preferred accessibility values for entities they represent in each environment?

4. Will analyzing the patterns we find for REs in constellations better inform a

hierarchy of accessibility?

1.2.3. Study Three (Article Three)

From the research on spoken languages, we know that interlocutors “need to make local assumptions about what their addressee knows or is attending to at each point in the discourse” (Arnold 2008, p. 499). The same is most likely true in ASL, but to date there have been no formal studies about how native users deploy REs as the same signers engage audiences with explicitly varying levels of access to the same content. The third study of the proposal will analyze the pattern of referring expressions in 15 native users of ASL as they are realized in two contexts: one, taken from studies one and two, where

an intended recipient’s access to the context of the narrative is known to be rich, and another, where the same participant’s retelling of the same narrative is carried out while the signer knows that the intended recipient has had significantly reduced access to the context. This study will ask the following key questions:

1. Does explicit awareness of different levels of recipient access impact the pattern of REs used in narrative samples of Deaf adults?

2. Do narratives designed to be maximally explicit demonstrate different allocations and patterns in the deployment of REs?

3. If so, are there implications for understanding/reconstructing a hierarchy of accessibility in ASL?

4. Are RE allocations conditioned by the stimulus? In other words, will the allocations we find be generalizable to more complex ASL narratives?