The UNM Department of Linguistics and Department of Psychology will host a joint presentation on “Learning to Speak or to Sign: Issues of Modality and Linguistic Typology” by University of California, Berkeley psychology and linguistics professor Dan Slobin and Nina Hoiting, from the Royal Effatha-Guyot Group in Haren, Netherlands, on Feb. 22, from 3-4 p.m. in Hodgin Hall’s Bobo Room.
Slobin and Hoiting will examine the difficulties that children have with learning sign languages. Early sign language learning can be seen as a gradual movement from gestural indices and icons to more linguistic forms. What this means to the average person is that deaf children learning a natural sign language are learning a language that is typologically different from the spoken language of the community at large.
Slobin and Hoiting’s research shows that both the modality and typology of signed languages make it necessary to modify current theoretical accounts of how these languages are learned.
A reception will follow the presentation’s end at 4 p.m. The presentation is free and open to the public.