Language attitudes in the American deaf community

This dissertation is an exploratory study of the perceptions of the forms and features of signing among social groups of the American Deaf community that vary with respect to generational groups, age of language acquisition, and race. The basic research question is: What are the linguistic and social factors that govern attitudes toward signing in the American Deaf community? This dissertation addresses that research question by documenting subjects' evaluative judgments of signing shown through videoclips and by assessing the significance of the factors underlying the subjects' evaluations. The dissertation reports on the results of four different studies: the perceptions of signing types (Study 1), the effects of social information on the perceptions of signing types (Study 2), the evaluation of signing (Study 3), and the description of signing (Study 4). All four studies are necessary to look into the nature of attitudes and perceptions of signing variation with the American Deaf community. The overall findings are as follow: in Study 1, the subjects in different social groups were able to differentiate the signing types but some social groups perceived the non-ASL signing type differently from the other social groups; in Study 2, certain social characteristics of Deaf signers produced a significant effect on the subjects' perception of signing to some extent; in Study 3, the subjects were more favorable to ASL than Mixed or Signed English based on the evaluative scales related to language and social aspects; and in Study 4, the subjects were able to discuss the forms and features of signing that led them to perceive it as ASL, Mixed, or Signed English but some subjects' comments contradicted with the other subjects' comments and a few subjects' comments were unexpected. The general attitude about ASL is more positive today than it was at the time William Stokoe published his influential linguistic work on ASL in 1960s, but based on the subjects' discussion of ASL forms and features, the knowledge of ASL structure is not as standardized, although most younger subjects are more familiar with the structure than are some older subjects.