Laughter among deaf signers

Abstract

The placement of laughter in the speech of hearing individuals is not random but "punctuates" speech, occurring during pauses and at phrase boundaries where punctuation would be placed in a transcript of a conversation. For speakers, language is dominant in the competition for the vocal tract since laughter seldom interrupts spoken phrases. For users of American Sign Language, however, laughter and language do not compete in the same way for a single output channel. This study investigated whether laughter occurs simultaneously with signing, or punctuates signing, as it does speech, in 11 signed conversations (with two to five participants) that had at least one instance of audible, vocal laughter. Laughter occurred 2.7 times more often during pauses and at phrase boundaries than simultaneously with a signed utterance. Thus, the production of laughter involves higher order cognitive or linguistic processes rather than the low-level regulation of motor processes competing for a single vocal channel. In an examination of other variables, the social dynamics of deaf and hearing people were similar, with "speakers" (those signing) laughing more than their audiences and females laughing more than males.