Donna Jo Napoli

• PhD
• Professor at Swarthmore College

The matter of raising and educating deaf children has been caught up in percepts of development that are persistently inaccurate and at odds with scientific research. These percepts have negatively impacted the health and quality of life of deaf children and deaf people in general. The all too prevalent advice is to raise the child strictly orally...

It is frequently posited that the speech of groups with particular communicative goals constitutes cohesive prosodic genres. Here we investigate American English newscaster speech to discover whether listeners can distinguish it from non-newscaster speech based on prosody alone, and, if so, which features they use to do so and which are ignored. In...

The challenge of supporting literacy among deaf children is as much linguistic as educational, since a major stumbling block can be the lack of a firm first language foundation. It is critical to meet this challenge, given the range of serious negative correlates to illiteracy. Students on the campuses of Gallaudet University and Swarthmore College...

The challenge of supporting literacy among deaf children is as much linguistic as educational, since a major stumbling block can be the lack of a firm first language foundation. It is critical to meet this challenge, given the range of serious negative correlates to illiteracy. Students on the campuses of Gallaudet University and Swarthmore College...

Torso articulation in sign languages is mentioned variably in the linguistic analysis of sign languages but is often ignored. The prevailing idea seems to be that detailed study of movement of the parts of the torso will yield little insight into linguistic matters – so mentions can be general and brief. The result is that torso articulations are a...

Taboo topics in deaf communities include the usual ones found in spoken languages, as well as ones particular to deaf experiences, both in how deaf people relate to hearing people and how deaf people interact with other deaf people. Attention to these topics can help linguists understand better the consequences of field method choices and lead them...

Visual manifestations of an object that moves from one place to another are common in sign languages. Here, we offer an overview of techniques for conveying motion of an entity based on an examination of storytelling and poetry in seven sign languages. The signer can use embodiment and/or classifiers to show translocating movement of an object, or...

Pour aider les professionnels de la santé et de l’audition à soutenir les parents d’enfants sourds, nous avons identifié des questions couramment posées par les parents et apporté des réponses fondées sur les données probantes. Ce faisant, un récit compatissant et positif sur la surdité et les enfants sourds est proposé, qui s’appuie sur des donnée...

We investigate the nature of torso articulation in human expression by analyzing its role in signing and dancing in six videos concerning the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly. One video exemplifies conversational signing genre; three videos exemplify sign language literature genre (one each in the sign languages of America, Brazil, a...

Sign languages are complex and intact human languages essential to the development and health of deaf children and adults. Yet, still, many families and medical professionals think the optimal option for deaf children is to be raised with spoken language, usually including a cochlear implant. Cochlear implants, however, have variable outcomes with...

Bilingual bimodalism is a great benefit to deaf children at home and in schooling. Deaf signing children perform better overall than non-signing deaf children, regardless of whether they use a cochlear implant. Raising a deaf child in a speech-only environment can carry cognitive and psycho-social risks that may have lifelong adverse effects. For c...

In our study, we seek to determine for sign languages the conditions under which a predicate can precede all its arguments. We consider data from the sign languages of Australia, Brazil, Britain, the Netherlands, and Sweden, examining interviews (informative dialogues) and narratives (monologues). While pressures of visualization converge to make S...

Echo phonology was originally proposed to account for obligatory coordination of manual and mouth articulations observed in several sign languages. However, previous research into the phenomenon lacks clear criteria for which components of movement can or must be copied when the articulators are so different. Nor is there discussion of which nonman...

Sign language phonological parameters are somewhat analogous to phonemes in spoken language. Unlike phonemes, however, there is little linguistic literature arguing that these parameters interact at the sublexical level. This situation raises the question of whether such interaction in spoken language phonology is an artifact of the modality or whe...

Introduction: Using the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as example, we argue that regulatory agencies worldwide should review their guidance on cochlear implants (CIs). Methods: This is a position paper, thus the methods are strictly argumentation. Here we give the motivation for our recommendation. The FDA's original approval o...

Cohn (2016 Cohn, N. (2016). Sequential images are not universal, or Caveats for using visual narratives in experimental tasks. In A. Papafragou, D. Grodner, D. Mirman, & J. C. Trueswell (Eds.), Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2057–2062). Cognitive Science Society. [Google Scholar]) posits two constrai...

Taboo terms offer a playground for linguistic creativity in language after language, and sign languages form no exception. The present paper offers the first investigation of taboo terms in sign languages from a cognitive linguistic perspective. We analyze the linguistic mechanisms that introduce offense, focusing on the combined effects of cogniti...

Deaf children need true inclusion to learn, entailing consistent, pervasive use of visuallearning techniques. This is achieved via bilingual education policies that enforce deaf children’s rights to use sign language, permitting teachers to engage in deaf pedagogy using sign language. Educational policies advocating inclusion via an interpreter in...

Sign language lexicons include iconic items, where phonological form is somewhat representative of sense. As experiences of individuals change, the mapping from form to meaning may become inappropriate (as when technological or environmental changes occur) or may be considered incongruous with perceptions of reality (as when culture shifts). Many m...

Resultatives in English and Dutch have developed special degree readings. These readings stem from a reinterpretation of the resultative predicate as indicating a high degree rather than an actual result. For example, when a parent says I love you to death , one need not call the cops, since the sentence is not about love turning lethal, but merely...

In sign languages, the task of communicating a shape involves drawing in the air with one moving hand (Method One) or two (Method Two). Since the movement path is iconic, method choice might be based on the shape. In the present studies we aimed to determine whether geometric properties motivate method choice. In a study of 17 deaf signers from six...

Sign languages exhibit the drive for ease of articulation found in spoken languages, particularly in fast and casual conversation, where the methods that reduce effort are shown here to be limited by the need to maintain recognizability. Participatory dance, which uses the same articulators as sign languages plus additional ones, also demonstrates...

This collection is intended to be a starting point for a discussion on pediatric bioethics and a reference when reflecting on similar cases. https://shop.aap.org/pediatric-collections-ethics-rounds-a-casebook-in-pediatric-bioethics-paperback/

Listeners often have the intuition that the speech of broadcast news reporters somehow ‘sounds different’; previous literature supports this observation and has described some distinctive aspects of newscaster register. This article presents two studies further describing the characteristic properties and functions of American English newscaster sp...

To assist medical and hearing-science professionals in supporting parents of deaf children, we have identified common questions that parents may have and provide evidence-based answers. In doing so, a compassionate and positive narrative about deafness and deaf children is offered, one that relies on recent research evidence regarding the critical...

This chapter offers an overview of taboo topics within deaf communities to bring forward issues not obvious to those outside deaf communities. We look at taboo behaviors of hearing people as they interact with deaf communities, considering linguistic and cultural appropriation, exploitation, and hearing privilege. We also look at taboo topics regar...

We present evidence for the influence of semantics on the order of subject, object, and verb in Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) sentences. While some have argued for a prevailing pattern of SVO in Libras, we find a strong tendency for this order in sentences that do not presuppose the existence of the verb’s object, but not in sentences that do, w...

There is no evidence that learning a natural human language is cognitively harmful to children. To the contrary, multilingualism has been argued to be beneficial to all. Nevertheless, many professionals advise the parents of deaf children that their children should not learn a sign language during their early years, despite strong evidence across m...

When the arms move in certain ways, they can cause the torso to twist or rock. Such extraneous torso movement is undesirable, especially during sign language communication, when torso position may carry linguistic significance, so we expend effort to resist it when it is not intended. This so-called “reactive effort” has only recently been identifi...

Resumo Ebooks provide new ways to advance developing literacy among deaf children. While some aim to promote literacy through explicit pedagogical techniques, the new ebooks described here aim only to offer stories that are fun to share, encouraging learning through interaction that naturally fosters language and preliteracy skills. Reading for pl...

Deaf children who are not provided with a sign language early in their development are at risk of linguistic deprivation; they may never be fluent in any language, and they may have deficits in cognitive activities that rely on a firm foundation in a first language. These children are socially and emotionally isolated. Deafness makes a child vulner...

The RISE bimodal-bilingual eBooks project is a joint initiative of Gallaudet University and Swarthmore College in the United States aimed to promote shared reading activities between hearing adults and their deaf children, although the format may welcome users from a broader spectrum. It produces ebooks, typically using published picture books as a...

Many properties of languages, including sign languages, are not uniformly distributed among items in the lexicon. Some of this nonuniformity can be accounted for by appeal to articulatory ease, with easier articulations being overrepresented in the lexicon in comparison to more difficult articulations. The literature on ease of articulation deals o...

Every year, 10 000 infants are born in the United States with sensorineural deafness. Deaf children of hearing (and nonsigning) parents are unique among all children in the world in that they cannot easily or naturally learn the language that their parents speak. These parents face tough choices. Should they seek a cochlear implant for their child?...

Dance and language are produced and performed by the body and governed by cognitive faculties. Yet regrettably little scholarship applies the tools of formal analysis from one field to the other. This article aims to enrich the dialogue between the two fields. The authors introduce an approach to dance typology informed by an analogy with the param...

Cochlear implants (CI) have demonstrated success in improving young deaf children's speech and low-level speech awareness across a range of auditory functions, but this success is highly variable, and how this success correlates to high-level language development is even more variable. Prevalence on the success rate of CI as an outcome for language...

The typical medical education curriculum does not address language development for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children. However, this issue is medical because of the frequency with which DHH children as a population face health complications due to linguistic deprivation. The critical period for language development is early; if a child does no...

Parents of small deaf children need guidance on constructing home and school environments that affect normal language acquisition. They often turn to physicians and spiritual leaders and, increasingly, the internet. These sources can be underinformed about crucial issues, such as matters of brain plasticity connected to the risk of linguistic depri...

Spoken language has a well-known drive for ease of articulation, which Kirchner (1998, 2004) analyzes as reduction of the total magnitude of all biomechanical forces involved. We extend Kirchner’s insights from vocal articulation to manual articulation, with a focus on joint usage, and we discuss ways that articulatory ease might be realized in sig...

A survey of reports of sign order from 42 sign languages leads to a handful of generalizations. Two accounts emerge, one amodal and the other modal. We argue that universal pressures are at work with respect to some generalizations, but that pressure from the visual modality is at work with respect to others. Together, these pressures conspire to m...

Sign Language poetry is especially valued for its presentation of strong visual images. Here, we explore the highly visual signs that British Sign Language and American Sign Language poets create as part of the ‘classifier system’ of their languages. Signed languages, as they create visually-motivated messages, utilise categoricity (more traditiona...

We argue for the existence of a state constitutional legal right to language. Our purpose here is to develop a legal framework for protecting the civil rights of the deaf child, with the ultimate goal of calling for legislation that requires all levels of government to fund programs for deaf children and their families to learn a fully accessible l...

Others have noticed that taboo terms in spoken language present unusual morphological and syntactic behavior. In this paper we examine a number of predicates in American Sign Language that have recently been formed from what were, historically, taboo-terms, as well as one more recently coined mildly taboo-term, and we show that they, likewise, beha...

This is an introduction to taboo expressions in ASL. Several word-formation processes are exploited in coining ASL taboo-terms, most also exploited by non-taboo terms. Further, ASL taboo terms are both entrenched and clever (sometimes humorous). This is expected if the entrenchment vs. evanescence of slang and taboo terms in sign languages is affec...

Children acquire language without instruction as long as they are regularly and meaningfully engaged with an accessible human language. Today, 80% of children born deaf in the developed world are implanted with cochlear devices that allow some of them access to sound in their early years, which helps them to develop speech. However, because of brai...

This paper describes the humor of Deaf communities, arguing that the humor is related primarily to the dominant visual experience of Deaf people, but also influenced by their knowledge of humor traditions in the hearing society at large. Sign language humor in America and Britain may be seen in the creation of new visual signs, the witty reanalysis...

Twenty-five chapters (including an instructive introduction) by fifty-two scholars offer information about over forty sign languages. Assessing how many sign languages there are in the world is difficult both because countries rarely include information about sign in censuses and because the determination of what counts as a language versus a less-...

Leaders of spiritual communities should support a family welcoming a deaf or hard-of-hearing child in such a way that the entire community offers the child genuine inclusion. The ideal situation for protecting mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being is to raise the child bilingually. The community leader can guide as the community participates...

Is it possible to identify sign languages by their prosody, that is, the rhythm and stress of their meaning, then determine if they are related to each other or other sign languages? If so, reasoned authors Donna Jo Napoli, Mark Mai, and Nicholas Gaw, perhaps they could offer such identification as a new way to typologize, or categorize sign langua...

This chapter offers evidence consistent with the proposal that sign languages preceded spoken languages in the evolution of language. Using conceptual integration theory, the authors argue that what may be considered "just a funny story in British Sign Language" contains the human singularities needed to create novel mappings and compressions betwe...

This is a compendium of work by scholars and activists involved in deaf matters. The introduction chapter sets up the global context; it is followed by twelve chapters, seven of which deal with the creation, context, and form of sign languages, and five of which deal with social issues and civil rights of Deaf communities. Each chapter has a respon...

: Sign languages have two primary articulation tracts: the two hands. They also have secondary articulation tracts that can be partitioned: the nonmanuals. Thus multiple propositions can be conveyed simultaneously. We have attested at most four simultaneously articulated independent propositions in sign languages, and suggest that this limit follow...

The work presented here considers some linguistic methods used in sign anthropomorphism. We find a cline of signed anthropomorphism that depends on a number of factors, including the skills and intention of the signer, the animacy of the entities represented, the form of their bodies, and the form of vocabulary signs referring to those entities. We...

Around 96 percent of children with hearing loss are born to parents with intact hearing, who may initially know little about deafness or sign language. Therefore, such parents will need information and support in making decisions about the medical, linguistic, and educational management of their child. Some of these decisions are time-sensitive and...

Taboo terms in certain English expressions and constructions are intensifiers, which have spread as a unit over time to various syntactic positions (Hoeksema & Napoli 2008). Here we look at the pragmatic coherence that has allowed such semantically disparate terms to be grammaticalized as a unit. We examine language using taboo terms in English wit...

FreidinRobert (ed.) Principles and parameters in comparative grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Pp. xii + 463. - Volume 28 Issue 2 - Donna Jo Napoli

The structures of syllables and of yoga poses are compared. Syllables are tripartite, with sound segments rising in sonority (acoustic energy) to a peak, then falling. Likewise, asanas are tripartite, with symmetrical movements flanking the sustaining, vital energy peak. In both entities, then, symmetric structure flanks energy peaks. This organiza...

The two English constructions exemplified in Let’s get the hell out of here (type G) and They beat the hell out of him (type B) differ both syntactically and semantically, but in both the taboo expression has the force of an intensifier. History (through a corpus investigation) reveals that the B-construction started as a literal exorcism (beat th...

Learning to read your native language can range from being a simple task to being enormously difficult. A lot depends on the writing system employed by your country, language, or culture. Alphabets, excluding manual alphabets, are systems built on a correspondence between single written symbols and single sound segments. The prototype of an alphabe...

Cochlear implants, mainstreaming, genetic engineering, and other ethical dilemmas confronting deaf people mandated a new, wide-ranging examination of these issues, fulfilled by Signs and Voices: Deaf Culture, Identity, Language, and Arts. This collection, carefully chosen from the 2004 Signs and Voices Conference, the Presidential Forum on American...

In ASL, two-handed signs fall into three major sets. In one set the hands have different shapes and either only the dominant hand moves or the hands move as a unit. Battison's Dominance Condition was intended to account for the fact that the non-dominant hand typically assumes an unmarked shape when it is stationary. However, we show that the non-d...

American Sign Language shares with spoken languages derivational and inflectional morphological processes, including compounding, reduplication, incorporation, and, arguably, templates. Like spoken languages, ASL also has an extensive nonderivational, noninflectional morphology involving phonological alternation although this is typically more limi...

MazzolaMichael (ed.), Issues and theory in Romance linguistics: selected papers from the Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages XXIII. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1994. Pp. xiii + 546. - Volume 31 Issue 2 - Donna Jo Napoli

Italian nouns and adjectives make use of almost two dozen evaluative affixes (to borrow Scalise’s 1984 term), most of which can also be found on verbs. While a few of these affixes are strongly productive on N and A and weakly productive on V, today most of those that occur on V are lexicalized (though not all; see Cortelazzo & Cardinale 1989). Nev...

T. Stowell and E. Wehrli, "Introduction" T. Stowell, "The Role of the Lexicon in Syntactic Theory" A. Belletti, "Agreement and Case in Past Participle Clauses in Italian" T. Stowell, "Passives and the Lexicon: Comments on Belletti" J. Bresnan and J.M. Kanerva, "Locative Inversion in Chichewa: A Case Study of Factorization in Grammar" P. Schachter,...

The contrast between subordination and co-ordination, from both a syntactic viewpoint and a semantic viewpoint, is assumed by most formal theories of grammar today, so much so that generally only avowed a-formalists or anti-formalists seriously entertain the possibility that any other type of relationship may exist between clauses. Yet paratactic c...

English exhibits PP, AP and NP resultative secondary predicates (SPs). Italian freely exhibits PP resultatives and, less commonly, AP resultatives. This difference follows from two facts. First, resultatives, being arguments of the V except in constructions involving ‘fake’ objects (see section 4), may appear only in positions that non-predicative...

The behavior of domain-sensitive phenomena in the double-object construction in English has been a topic of controversy. On the basis of this behavior and other facts about the double-object construction Larson (1988) offered an analysis of that construction in which the first object asymmetrically c-commands the second. Jackendoff (1990) responded...

Chomsky's (1981) i-within-i condition (also written as i/i) blocks co-indexation of a phrase with one of its proper subconstituents:(I) *[…a1…]iWe argue here that the i-within-i condition as stated in (I) and used in current work is both empirically inadequate and theoretically incoherent.2 Many of the data that the i-within-i condition has been ta...