A study of tactile sign language communication of deafblind people

Abstract

Deafblind people form a heterogeneous community in which every individual may have different types of hearing and sight loss. Some deafblind people use tactile sign language and interpreters in their daily lives. What is it that deafblind seem to have much less trouble communicating with deafblind interlocutors? For example, the latest study, with empirical data from cross-linguistic interaction between Norwegian and Swedish deafblind signers, shows that they worked together to create a mutual understanding in their conversations. This study contributes to knowledge of how language and interaction skills are brought into the process of understanding each other, despite linguistic barriers.

The talk will be simultaneously translated from Swedish sign language into English.

About Johanna Mesch

Johanna Mesch is Professor of Sign language at the Sign Language Section of the Department of Linguistics at Stockholm University, Sweden. She holds a PhD in sign language linguistics 1998. The dissertation investigated how turn-taking takes place in so-called four-handed or tactile signing. She discovered that for quick interaction, deaf-blind people would turn to a pattern with a sending hand and a receiving hand, to quickly switch ‘speaking’ turns. The study initiated new interest in deaf-blind interaction and has clearly led to a ‘linguistic turn’ in the approach of deaf-blind communication. In the last 20 years, her research work has focused on the sign language linguistics and the corpora in Swedish Sign Language, incl. the learner corpus and the tactile sign language corpus.