feedback pls

[Bonita Squires]

Hello all,

I wrote a while back asking about ASL phonology
articles.  Thanks to those of you who wrote back, I am
presently making my way through Channon ª±  dissertation
and Brentani ª±  book.

Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) will be
hosting the Concordia Linguistics Undergraduate
Conference (CLUC)  in May and I am planning on
presenting a paper.  However, the abstract is due this
weekend and I would appreciate some feedback from all
of you (as my professor has been unaccustomedly
occupied these last weeks with a new baby!).  I will
be writing about a universal underlying phonological
representation that could underlie both spoken and
signed languages.  Through Channon ª±  influence (Oneseg
vs. Multiseg), I have been thinking about the fact
that a single word in sign can be physically
comparable to a single sound in speech (and both may
have internally unordered features)... meaning that
the brain could possibly represent these as the same
thing, but the actual realization surfaces as a whole
word in sign but only a single phoneme in speech due
to differences in articulatory systems (speed, usage
of space, number of articulators, etc.).  Whole words
in sign and single sounds in speech are subsequently
combined to form ordered sequences (signed sentences
vs. spoken words), and so on.

Am I headed in a direction that ª±  been looked at
before?  From what I ª>  seeing in the literature,
comparisons are constantly being made between signed
words and spoken words, although intuitively, I feel
that these are not a necessary distinction for the
brain to make in terms of articulation (it ª±  really
all just a stream of  ©± ound k  .  But through all this,
I ª>  warring with that side of me that says that
grammar and production are incompatible...
Thoughts? Reactions?  Please be critical but
constructive, I ª>  looking for angles and issues...  :)

Bonita Squires
Honours in Linguistics, Minor in Psychology
Concordia University


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