LangDiv: Tracking the Core Lexicon in the Tactile Modality of an Emerging Language

During the past several decades, linguists and psychologists have discovered dozens of new languages emerging in communities around the world, offering unprecedented scientific opportunities to address important questions, previously deemed intractable, about where language comes from and how it can be structured in new and surprising ways. Since the 1960s, studying signed languages has generated deeper understandings of the core properties of language and how those properties can be realized in the visual-manual modality. This project builds on that work to ask how language can emerge and grow in the tactile modality. The researchers are asking this question in an historically unprecedented time when some DeafBlind communities are communicating via reciprocal, tactile channels. They call this practice and the language emerging from it, "Protactile," or "PT." Previous research demonstrated that PT communication triggered systemic changes in "sub-lexical structure," which is the level of language that supplies the basic units needed to create words and phrases and the rules that determine how those units can be combined. This was precipitated by a shift from "air space" (on and around the body of the signer), to "contact space," (on the body of the addressee). This change led to new phonological units and a conventionalized system for coordinating the four articulators of speaker and addressee to make combinations of those units possible in complex constructions, which are used to express spatial relations and direction. This project asks how those mechanisms and structures are being used to build words in the core lexicon, or the highly conventionalized words one would expect to find in a dictionary. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.