The languages of bimodal bilinguals
Abstract
This paper presents a study about the linguistic behavior of four bimodal bilinguals (two Americans and two Brazilians) who had acquired a sign language at home, a heritage language (American Sign Language – ASL – or Brazilian Sign Language – Libras, respectively) in a country that speaks a different majority language (English or Portuguese). These bimodal bilinguals are referred to as Codas, a name created by an organization of hearing children of Deaf parents (http://www.coda-international.org/). Codas represent a group of bilinguals that grow up with a visual-spatial language, the sign language, while the language used around the community is an audio-oral language. This difference in the modality of the languages impacts the way that these languages interact in the lives of these signers/speakers. Our study analyzes the productions of these American and Brazilian Codas to verify how these languages interact considering that they are in different modalities, and also what would be the linguistic effects of these interactions. The focus of the paper is on what is called blending contexts, that is, when the two languages are produced simultaneously. We verified that the language blending always involves one proposition and one syntactic derivation, even with two languages being produced together at the same time. In syntax, the productions are always congruent from the syntactic point of view and redundant from the semantic perspective. The languages follow one syntactic computation and insert the morphological components from both languages following the synthesis model (Lillo-Martin, Quadros, Koulidobrova & Chen Pichler, 2010; Lillo-Martin, Quadros & Chen Pichler, 2016).
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