Language Variation and Change

Every language can have different ways of expressing the same concept, and the same is true in sign languages. The sign for "chocolate," for example, may look different when a deaf person from Haifa signs it, compared to the sign used by a deaf person from Tel Aviv.

In my research, I am interested in the factors which predict the use of variants in language, especially age-related variants, and the changes in language over time.

I am also interested in the ways in which deaf people embody different aspects of their identity through their language, such as embodying gender and sexual identity.

In this study, I use motion capture technologies to explore the similarities and differences between the body movements of deaf signers and the gestures that accompany the speech of hearing people, and what this can teach us about the way people show their sexuality or gender identity through their bodies.

In 2020, as part of a project funded by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF), our team began a corpus-based sociolinguistic study of Israeli Sign Language.
As part of this project, we collected data from approximately 120 deaf people in four regions of Israel: Tel Aviv and the centre, Haifa and the north, Jerusalem and the surrounding areas, and Beer Sheva and the south.
The project aims to investigate three different situations of language contact: (1) contact between different regional variations of Israeli Sign Language, (2) contact between Israeli Sign Language and Arabic, (3) contact between Israeli Sign Language and the local sign language in Kufr Qassem.

As part of my research, I support the documentation of two languages: (1) the local sign language of Kufr Qassem (as part of the Endangered Languages ​​Fund) and (2) Israeli Sign Language (as part of the project to document the life stories of elderly deaf people in the digital archive of the SignHub website).
A documentary about the lives of elderly deaf people from seven countries called "We Were There, We Are Here" is available to watch on the SignHub website.

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​Language Emergence

As part of the "Grammar of the Body" project funded by the European Research Council and led by Professor Wendy Sandler at the Sign Language Research Centre, University of Haifa, a team of researchers, including myself, are examining young sign languages ​​in Israel and what they can tell us about language emergence: How does a new language develop linguistic complexity from the beginning of its emergence? What are the characteristics of language emergence de novo? 

These questions cannot be fully answered by looking at spoken languages alone, since they are all are thousands of years old or in contact with older languages. But sign languages ​​can emerge at any given time and provide empirical data to test hypotheses related to the emergence of language.

To this end, we filmed deaf people in three deaf communities in Israel, each with a separate language: Israeli Sign Language, the local sign language of Kufr Qassem, and the sign language of the Al-Sayyid tribe in the Negev.

All three languages ​​emerged only about ninety years ago and began their formation at the same time.

However, one part of what we are investigating is how each of the sociolinguistic conditions affects the rate of language emergence. In a series of studies, we show that basic aspects of linguistic complexity develop in stages.

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Language Acquisition

Deaf children are often bimodal bilinguals, meaning they use sign language and also acquire the language spoken by hearing people in the community in which they live.

In Israel, deaf children in Arabic speaking communities are in a unique situation of multilingualism – they are trilingual as, along with Israeli Sign Language, they also learn both varieties of Palestinian Arabic.

In a series of studies, this project aims to examine the issue of language acquisition by deaf children in these complex linguistic situations, with special emphasis on word order and argument structure.

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Emotion perception

As part of a project funded by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) together with Professor Wendy Sandler (University of Haifa) and Professor Boaz Ben-David (Reichman University), this study examines the perception of emotions by deaf and hearing signers.

The ability to perceive emotions in two language channels simultaneously, lexical and prosodic, and to direct attention in a deliberate and selective manner to one of the two channels is a fundamental component of everyday communication.

In emotion perception, speakers show a preference for the prosodic channel, and when explicitly asked to focus on only one speech channel, they are unable to perceive one channel without the influence of the other.

The aim of this project is to examine the emotion perception of deaf people whose primary language is sign language. The role of exposure to sign language and the role of hearing status will also be examined.

As part of the project, the DASS-21 (Depression Anxiety Stress Scales) questionnaire was translated from Hebrew to Israeli Sign Language and is now available online.