=?utf-8?Q?27.2135, _All:_Obituary:_Nini_Hoiting_(1944_=E2=80=93_2016)?=

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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-2135. Tue May 10 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.2135, All: Obituary: Nini Hoiting (1944 – 2016)

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Date: Tue, 10 May 2016 09:20:15
From: Dan Slobin [slobin at berkeley.edu]
Subject: Obituary: Nini Hoiting (1944 – 2016)

 
Obituary:  Nini Hoiting (December 20, 1944 – March 22, 2016) — from Dan Slobin

With deep sadness I report that my dear life-partner and research colleague,
Nini Hoiting, passed away at the age of 71 after a long and debilitating
illness. Nini spent most of her life in Groningen, in the Netherlands, sharing
her time with Berkeley in the past 25 years.  From 1983 to her retirement in
2009 she was a clinical researcher and sign language psycholinguist at The
Royal Institute for the Deaf “H. D. Guyot” (now Koninklijke Kentalis); from
1998 to 2001 she was also a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Human
Development, University of California, Berkeley.  

Nini was an early advocate for the recognition of sign language and its use in
child-rearing and education.  In the 1980s she worked with innovative programs
to teach sign language to hearing parents of deaf children.  The practice in
those years was to encourage parents to speak Dutch and sign at the same time
(Sign-Supported Dutch, NmG).  In her clinical work, Nini made regular home
visits to videotape parent-child interaction; the same children were observed
and videotaped in preschool activities.  She created a version of the
MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (MCDI) for Sign Language
of the Netherlands and tracked vocabulary growth and communicative advances in
the children, in comparison to deaf children with deaf parents.  By the 1990s
it became clear to her and her colleagues that Sign-Supported Dutch was not a
fully adequate medium of communication, and new programs were instituted using
a full, natural sign language without speech support (Sign Language of the
Netherlands, NGT).  She was a strong advocate of bilingual programs for the
deaf, and was proud of having created a “Kijkbibliotheek”—a visual library of
signed stories that hearing parents could view with their deaf children.  Nini
had an earlier career in theater, as an actor on stage and screen and as a
theater director.  She drew on these talents to select and train skilled deaf
storytellers for the project.  Parents were given the Dutch storybooks on
which the signed stories were based, aiding early development of Dutch
literacy.

The clinical work produced a unique archive of videotaped data of early
signing, along with vocabulary checklists.  More than 30 children were
followed regularly in the first three or four years of life.  This is the
first large-scale documentation of language development of Dutch deaf
children.  These materials have all been digitized by the Max Planck Institute
for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, and are being prepared for a national Dutch
sign language archive under the direction of Dr. Onno Crasborn, Radboud
University, Nijmegen.  The data formed the basis of developmental
psycholinguistic research, supported by the National Science Foundation and
the Max Planck Institute.  The findings are presented in Nini’s 2009 PhD
dissertation and a series of published papers, many with me as co-author.  (A
pdf of her dissertation can be obtained per request:  slobin at berkeley.edu.) 
We also supervised a cohort of graduate students at Berkeley.  This group
created the Berkeley Transcription System (BTS), designed to transcribe sign
languages at the level of meaning components rather than descriptive glosses
and articulatory annotation.  We argued that the typology of sign
languages—essentially head-marking and thereby different from the
dependent-marking languages of the surrounding spoken languages—required a
distinct sort of morphological and syntactic analysis.  A consequence for
acquisition is that children are, in Hoiting’s terms, “verb-attenders” rather
than “noun-attenders.”

In her dissertation, "The myth of simplicity: Sign Language Acquisition by
Dutch Deaf Toddlers" (University of Groningen, 2009), Nini Hoiting
demonstrated that hearing parents can successfully learn some version of sign
language, contributing to early vocabulary growth in their deaf children. 
However, only the use of a natural sign language such as Sign Language of the
Netherlands (NGT), rather than a sign system based on simultaneous speaking
(NmG), has the potential to foster acquisition of vocabulary and morphological
complexity that approaches the achievements of deaf children with deaf
parents.  From the side of child-directed signing, parents trained in a full
sign language produced more complex and more interpretable utterances,
facilitating their children’s acquisition.  With the rise of cochlear
implants, Nini still argued strongly for early bilingualism.

She was beginning to investigate the tactile manual communication of the
deaf-blind, with whom she could communicate, when her progressive illness
intervened.  She was also much concerned with what she called “the
gesture-sign continuum,” and was beginning to compare gestures of deaf and
hearing toddlers.  

Nini had a passion for research and took delight in language—from linguistics,
to poetry, to medieval languages and literatures.  She was comfortably at home
with deaf colleagues and friends, and could work well with developmentally
delayed and autistic deaf children.  She delighted in travel, where she could
engage her lifelong involvement with history, art, anthropology.  And she
loved the challenge of going to Groningen’s ample fish market and creating a
tantalizing new meal from fresh catch from the North Sea.   Nini Hoiting is
remembered as a beautiful independent spirit, a devoted scholar, researcher
and clinician—and a splendid human being.

Contributions in her memory can be made to Doofgewoon (“Normal Deaf”), which
carries on work to which Nini was dedicated.  The site is being developed;
please check Doofgewoon.nl, which is scheduled to open in May 2016. 
Contributions will support activities to inform Dutch parents of deaf children
about bilingualism, deaf culture, and sign language.

 


Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics
                     Language Acquisition



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