BLC Talk: Serpil Karabüklü November 24

Dear all,

You are cordially invited to a BLC talk by Dr. Serpil Karabüklü, University of Chicago, on Friday, November 24. The title of the talk is 'Accommodations to Atypicality: Role of Nonmanuals'. Please, find the details below.

Best regards,
Onur

Date: Friday, November 24, 2023
Time: 3:00pm
Place: M2181 (South Campus)

Abstract:
Cooperative and efficient interlocutors package the information by introducing possible alternatives and signaling which ones will be coming up. This study investigates how signers adapt their use of non-manual behaviors (NMMs) in atypical instrumental contexts in two unrelated sign languages (SLs), American Sign Language (ASL) and Turkish Sign Language (TİD). In spoken languages, previous work as shown that interlocutors try to arrive at an agreement on the question under discussion. To accommodate unexpectedness, speakers tend to have longer utterances and provide more details. Similarly, a crosslinguistic study has also shown that signers produced longer utterances in atypical contexts. Analysis of short descriptions of 9 ASL and 10 TİD signers showed that participants crosslinguistically produced significantly more nonmanuals in atypical conditions (ATY) than typical conditions (TYP) (&#946;=4.83, SE=.36, t=13.40, p<.001). In terms of production planning, two acc ounts can explain these results: (i) Signers are gaining more time to plan their utterance in a difficult situation and/or (ii) Signers are accommodating to their interlocutors by increasing the visual saliency of the instrument and event. With regard to the second explanation, the follow-up question is whether the interlocutors benefit from more cues via nonmanuals to distinguish the typicality of the instrument.