The face of bimodal bilingualism: grammatical markers in American Sign Language are produced when bilinguals speak to English monolinguals

Abstract

Bimodal bilinguals, fluent in a signed and a spoken language, provide unique insight into the nature of syntactic integration and language control. We investigated whether bimodal bilinguals who are conversing with English monolinguals produce American Sign Language (ASL) grammatical facial expressions to accompany parallel syntactic structures in spoken English. In ASL, raised eyebrows mark conditionals, and furrowed eyebrows mark wh-questions; the grammatical brow movement is synchronized with the manual onset of the clause. Bimodal bilinguals produced more ASL-appropriate facial expressions than did nonsigners and synchronized their expressions with the onset of the corresponding English clauses. This result provides evidence for a dual-language architecture in which grammatical information can be integrated up to the level of phonological implementation. Overall, participants produced more raised brows than furrowed brows, which can convey negative affect. Bimodal bilinguals suppressed but did not completely inhibit ASL facial grammar when it conflicted with conventional facial gestures. We conclude that morphosyntactic elements from two languages can be articulated simultaneously and that complete inhibition of the nonselected language is difficult.

Fig. 1. Illustration of grammatical facial expressions in American Sign Language (ASL)

The illustration in (a) shows raised eyebrows produced at the onset of an ASL conditional clause. The speaker is signing, “RAIN, CLASS CANCEL,” which translates into English as “If it rains, class will be canceled.” The illustration in (b) shows furrowed brows produced at the onset of an ASL wh-question. The speaker is signing, “HOW-MANY SIBLINGS HE/SHE HAVE,” which translates into English as “How many siblings does he/she have?”