Language Variation, Change, and Identity

All languages, whether signed or spoken, exhibit variation in the ways in which a given concept is expressed. For example, the lexical sign for "chocolate" may differ between signers from Haifa and Tel Aviv. My research investigates the linguistic and social factors that constrain the use and distribution of such variants, with particular attention to age-related variation and evidence of language change over time.

A further strand of my research examines how deaf people use language to construct and express different dimensions of identity, including gender and sexual identity. I am particularly interested in the ways in which social identities are embodied through linguistic and communicative practices.

In collaboration with computer science researchers, I also employ motion-capture technologies to investigate the physical and articulatory dimensions of signing and gesturing. These technologies enable detailed quantitative analysis of bodily movement and contribute to a broader understanding of how linguistic and social information is encoded in the body.

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From 2020 to 2024, as part of a project funded by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF), our research team developed the first Corpus of Israeli Sign Language (ISL), providing an important empirical resource for sociolinguistic research. We collected data from 120 deaf ISL signers across four regions of Israel: Tel Aviv and the central region, Haifa and the north, Jerusalem and its surrounding areas, and Beer Sheva and the south. The project examined three forms of language contact: (1) contact between regional varieties of ISL; (2) contact between ISL and Arabic; and (3) contact between ISL and the local sign language used in Kufr Qassem.

My research has also contributed to the documentation of two sign languages. The first is Kufr Qassem Sign Language, documented as part of a project supported by the Endangered Languages Fund. The second is Israeli Sign Language, documented through the Corpus of ISL as well as a project focusing on the life stories of older deaf people, whose testimonies are preserved in the digital archive of the SignHub website. A related documentary, We Were There, We Are Here, documents the lives and experiences of older deaf people from seven countries and is available through the SignHub website.

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Language Emergence and Evolution

As part of a British Academy Global Professorship grant (2025–2029), I am collaborating with Professor Adam Schembri to investigate language variation and change from the perspective of language evolution. Drawing on Darwinian approaches to language evolution, we examine three interrelated questions.

First, we investigate the extent and nature of linguistic variation at different stages of the sign language life cycle by comparing three distinct sociolinguistic contexts: an emerging sign language, Israeli Sign Language; an established sign language, British Sign Language; and a sign language undergoing language shift, Kufr Qassem Sign Language. Second, we examine the selection pressures that influence the persistence or loss of particular lexical variants, including iconicity, social value, perceptual ease, and articulatory ease. Third, we investigate how lexical variants become distributed throughout deaf communities by examining the relationship between social networks and patterns of lexical variant use.

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Between 2015 and 2020, I was a member of a research team investigating young sign languages in Israel and their implications for theories of language emergence. The main project I was involved in called the Grammar of the Body was funded by the European Research Council and led by Professor Wendy Sandler at the Sign Language Research Centre at the University of Haifa. The project addressed fundamental questions concerning the emergence of linguistic structure: How does linguistic complexity develop during the earliest stages of a language's emergence? What are the characteristic properties of language emergence? These questions cannot be fully addressed through the study of spoken languages alone, since existing spoken languages have typically developed over thousands of years and have been shaped by prolonged contact with other languages. Sign languages, by contrast, can emerge within observable historical periods, providing unique empirical opportunities to test hypotheses concerning the origins and development of language. To investigate this, we collected video data from three deaf communities in Israel, each using a distinct sign language: Israeli Sign Language, Kufr Qassem Sign Language, and the sign language of the Al-Sayyid Bedouin community in the Negev. All three languages emerged approximately 90 years ago and began developing during roughly the same historical period. This comparative setting provides an opportunity to examine how differing sociolinguistic conditions influence the trajectory and rate of language emergence. A series of studies demonstrated that fundamental aspects of linguistic complexity emerge incrementally and develop in systematic stages.

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Language Acquisition

Deaf children frequently grow up as bimodal bilinguals, acquiring a sign language alongside the spoken language of the wider hearing community. Deaf children in Arabic-speaking communities in Israel occupy a particularly complex multilingual environment. In addition to Israeli Sign Language, they acquire two varieties of Palestinian Arabic: Modern Standard Arabic and Palestinian Arabic. Their linguistic experience therefore provides a valuable context for investigating multilingual language acquisition across both signed and spoken modalities.

A series of studies has examined language acquisition in these complex linguistic environments, with particular emphasis on word order and argument structure. This research contributes to our understanding of how deaf children acquire and organize multiple languages across different modalities and linguistic systems.

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Emotion Perception and Production

In collaboration with Professor Wendy Sandler (University of Haifa) and Professor Boaz Ben-David (Reichman University), I participated in an Israel Science Foundation (ISF)-funded project investigating emotion perception among deaf and hearing signers.

The ability to perceive emotional information across multiple linguistic channels and to selectively direct attention to one channel constitutes a fundamental component of everyday communication. In spoken language, emotional information is conveyed through both lexical and prosodic channels. Research on emotion perception has shown that hearing speakers tend to privilege prosodic information and, when explicitly instructed to attend to only one channel, have difficulty completely excluding information from the other.

The project examined emotion perception among deaf individuals whose primary language is Israeli Sign Language, with particular attention to the roles of sign language exposure and hearing status. As part of the project, the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS-21) questionnaire was translated from Hebrew into ISL and is now available online.

Following this project, Svetlana Dachkovsky, Wendy Sandler, and I were awarded a Data Sciences Institute grant to investigate emotion production in deaf and hearing individuals. This subsequent work extends our research from the perception of emotion to the linguistic and embodied mechanisms involved in its production.