A Basic Grammar of Croatian Sign Language

在美国国家科学基金会的支持下，罗尼·威尔伯博士将领导一个由美国和克罗地亚研究人员组成的国际团队，对克罗地亚手语（HZJ）的语言结构进行为期五年的调查。与萨格勒布大学的Ljubica Pribanic博士一起，我们的目标是构建HZJ的基本语法描述。克罗地亚和美国的许多聋哑儿童将从这项合作研究中受益，因为它将立即应用于手语教学课程材料的开发，培训手语口译员，言语语言病理学家，听力学家，并教育聋哑教师如何早期使用手语可以提高聋哑儿童的读写能力和学习成绩。两个科学问题激发了这个项目。首先，手语结构的差异有多大？这个问题反映了人们对确定感知和生产方式对手语和口语本质的影响的兴趣。我们将能够将HZJ与美国手语、奥地利手语（OGS）和其他手语进行比较。我们专注于五个一般的调查领域：及物陈述句，是/否问题，wh问题，否定和动词形态。这些结果说明了人类概念结构及其映射到自然语言的核心问题。第二，口语对土著手语的影响是什么？这将是第一个在斯拉夫语国家使用的手语语法。与其他手语及其当地口语的比较，对于手语研究领域来说是新颖的，并且应该对我们对“自然人类语言”概念的理解产生新的见解。

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Ronnie Wilbur will lead an international team of American and Croatian researchers in a five year investigation of the linguistic structure of Croatian Sign Language (HZJ). With Dr. Ljubica Pribanic at the University of Zagreb, our goal is to construct a basic grammatical description of HZJ. Many deaf children in Croatia and in the U.S. will benefit from this collaborative research because it will have immediate application to the development of curricular materials for teaching sign language, training sign language interpreters, speech-language pathologists, audiologists, and educating teachers of the deaf about how early sign language usage can foster improved literacy and academic achievement with deaf children. Two scientific questions motivate this project. First, how divergent are sign language structures? This question reflects the interest in determining the effects that modality of perception and production has on the nature of signed and spoken languages. We will be able to compare HZJ with ASL, Austrian Sign Language (OGS), and other signed languages. We focus on five general areas of inquiry: transitive declarative sentences, yes/no-questions, wh-questions, negation and verbal morphology. These results speak to the core issues of human conceptual structure and its mapping onto natural languages. Second, what is the influence of spoken languages on indigenous sign languages? This grammar will be the first on a sign language used in a Slavic speaking country. The proposed comparison with other signed languages, and with their local spoken languages, is novel to the field of sign language research and should yield new insights into our understanding of the notion "natural human language".