Mouthings in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT): Sociolinguistic differences in a heterogeneous community.
(English)
Abstract
The second half of the previous century saw a gradual change in education of deaf children in the Netherlands. Following the Milan congress in 1880, signing was forbidden in classrooms; deaf children were expected to learn to speak, and understand spoken language through lip reading. With the rise of research into sign linguistics came the notion that sign languages are real, full-fledged languages, and with that notion the educational system changed; at first Sign
Supported Dutch entered the classrooms, and later NGT became an instruction language
(together with spoken language).
We wanted to know if and how these changes in the educational system have affected the use of mouthings in signed languages. In contrast to language inherent mouth gestures, mouthings are derived from the spoken language(s) surrounding the deaf community (see also
Schermer 1990, Boyes Braem & Sutton-Spence 2001, Nadolske & Rosenstock 2007, Sutton-
Spence 2007, Crasborn et al. 2008a, Vinson et al. 2010, Mohr 2012). In the light of the changes in the educational system, we expect that a decrease in spoken language input will be reflected by reduced use of mouthings in the younger generation, or smaller mouth movements. Indeed, cursory inspection of the videos in the corpus suggests that there are differences between older and younger signers, an impression supported by deaf native signers.
However, previous research on a small subset of the corpus (12 signers in 16 clips;
Van de Sande & Crasborn 2009) did not reveal significant differences. A subsequent study on amount of mouth opening, using the same sample, did not reveal significant differences either
(Stadthaus 2010).
The present study aims to extend these first two studies by not only studying a larger group of signers, but also by taking into account a more differentiated set of metadata classifying this heterogeneous community. We compared older and younger signers from the
Corpus NGT (Crasborn et al. 2008b). Currently, there are 219 clips in the corpus that are fully or partly annotated for mouth actions; we selected 38 signers for whom at least 5 minutes of discussion sessions were annotated at both the gloss and the mouth levels. We investigated frequency and proportion of different types of mouth actions in relation to the manual activity, the number of mouth actions without accompanying manual signs, and the proportion of manual signs that were not accompanied by any mouth action. Results were set against a background of various sociolinguistic variables: apart from age, gender and region we took a detailed look at the individual educational backgrounds of the signers. Moreover, we tempted to assess signers’ proficiency by having their signing reviewed by a deaf native signer.
Altogether, this more detailed approach to the impact of personal history on the use of the mouth in Sign Language of the Netherlands will allow us to see how the complexity of individual circumstances relates to language use.
References
Boyes Braem, P., & Sutton-Spence, R. (Eds.). (2001). The hands are the head of the mouth.
The mouth as articulator in sign languages . Hamburg: Signum.
Crasborn, O., van der Kooij, E., Waters, D., Woll, B., & Mesch, J. (2008a). Frequency distribution and spreading behavior of different types of mouth actions in three sign languages. Sign Language & Linguistics, 11 (1), 45–67.

Crasborn, O., Zwitserlood, I., & Ros, J. (Producer). (2008b) Corpus NGT. An open access digital corpus of movies with annotations of Sign Language of the Netherlands. Video corpus of signed language interaction
Mohr, S. (2012). The visual-gestural modality and beyond: Mouthings as a language contact phenomenon in Irish Sign Language. Sign Language & Linguistics, 15 (2), 185–211.
Nadolske, M. A., & Rosenstock, R. (2007). Occurrence of mouthings in American Sign
Language: A preliminary study. In P. Perniss, R. Pfau & M. Steinbach (Eds.), Visible variation: Comparative studies in sign language structure (pp. 35–62). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Sande, I. v. d., & Crasborn, O. (2009). Lexically bound mouth actions in Sign Language of the Netherlands. A comparison between different registers and age groups. Linguistics in the Netherlands, 26 (1), 78–90.
Schermer, T. M. (1990). In search of a language. Influences from spoken Dutch on Sign
Language of the Netherlands.
Delft: Eburon.
Stadthaus, M. (2010). De mate van mondopening bij dove Nederlandse gebaarders.
Radboud
University, Nijmegen.
Sutton-Spence, R. (2007). Mouthings and simultaneity in British Sign Language. In M.
Vermeerbergen, L. Leeson & O. Crasborn (Eds.), Simultaneity in signed languages (pp.
147–162). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Vinson, D. P., Thompson, R. L., Skinner, R., Fox, N., & Vigliocco, G. (2010). The hands and mouth do not always slip together in British Sign Language: Dissociating articulatory channels in the lexicon. Psychological Science, 21 (8), 1158–1167.