What You See Is What You Feel: Sign Language Phonology in a ProTactile World

语言渗透到人类的存在中；它调解我们的互动，影响我们的思维模式，框定我们的经验，是相互之间和世代之间传播知识的关键机制。尽管语言有着明确而深远的意义，但关于它的本质、它是如何产生的、它是如何发展的，我们仍然有许多不了解的地方。自20世纪60年代初以来，手语为观察语言的核心属性提供了一个新的视角。作为这项工作的结果，语言学家越来越多地将语言视为一个抽象的认知系统，它可以通过视觉-手势通道表达和感知，就像它可以通过口语-听觉通道表达和感知一样。这一见解帮助我们理解了语言最强大的特征之一：它独特的灵活性，使其能够适应不同的环境、人口和传播条件。这项研究建立在过去60年手语研究的基础上，通过考察语言从视觉手势通道向触觉本体通道的转换过程中的重构。调查人员在一个史无前例的时刻进行这项研究，这是第一次，一个由聋人语言使用者组成的大型、有社会组织和政治参与的网络，通过相互的、触觉的和本体感知的渠道相互直接交流。聋人把这种交流方式称为“触觉”(PT)。在初步研究中，我们观察到PT交际实践似乎正在导致Prottactile-ASL语音结构的系统性变化。为了分析这些变化，研究人员提出了假设，将在三组人中进行为期五年的测试：PT聋人手语者、非PT聋人手语者和非PT聋人手语者。对这些群体进行比较，可以将新出现的语音模式与感觉丧失的即时补偿区分开来。原触觉-ASL的出现和发展为理解人类语言如何适应截然不同的传播和互动条件提供了一个独特的机会。

Language permeates human existence; it mediates our interactions, influences our patterns of thought, frames our experiences, and is a key mechanism for transmitting knowledge to one another and from generation to generation. Despite the clear and far-reaching significance of language, there are still many things we do not understand about its nature, about how it emerges, and about how it develops. Since the early 1960s, signed languages have offered a new lens for viewing the core properties of language. As a result of this work, linguists have increasingly come to see language as an abstract cognitive system, which can be expressed and perceived through a visual-gestural channel just as it can be expressed and perceived through an oral-aural channel. This insight helps us understand one of the most powerful characteristics of language: its unique flexibility, which allows it to be adapted to different circumstances, populations, and conditions of transmission.This research builds on the past sixty years of sign language research by examining a restructuring of language as it is transferred from a visual-gestural modality to a tactile-proprioceptive modality. The investigators are conducting this research in
a historically unprecedented moment, when, for the first time, a large, socially organized 
and politically engaged network of DeafBlind language-users are communicating directly with
one another via reciprocal, tactile and proprioceptive channels. DeafBlind people refer to these communication practices as "protactile" (PT). In preliminary research, it has been observed that PT communication practices seem to be leading to systematic changes in the phonological structure of protactile-ASL. In order to analyze these changes, the investigators have developed hypotheses, which will be tested over a five-year period among three groups: PT DeafBlind signers, non-PT DeafBlind signers, and non-PT Deaf signers. Comparing these groups will allow emergent phonological patterns to be distinguished from on-the-fly compensation for sensory loss. The emergence and development of protactile-ASL offers a unique opportunity to understand how human language can be adapted to radically different conditions of transmission and interaction.