CODA Project | Sign Linguistics & Language Acquisition Lab

One of the most exciting aspects of our Bibibi project was observing code-blending in young bimodal bilingual children. We explored the types of code-blending found and hypothesized a model of bilingual language architecture that could account for the possibility of this phenomenon. However, we couldn’t test this model using only data from children, because their code-blending was fairly limited due to their young age.

With this in mind, we took up a new study of bimodal bilingual adults! This study examines various aspects of bimodal bilingual language use by Coda adults, focusing on the nature of their code-blending.

Code-Blending

What is code-blending? It’s the bimodal-bilingual analogue to code-switching, but it takes advantage of the different primary modalities of sign and speech by producing (parts of) an utterance simultaneously. Here are a couple of examples of code-blending (from our acceptability judgment task).

People

This project includes the collaboration of many people! Here are some of those who have collaborated on various aspects of this project:

At UConn	At UFSC	At Gallaudet	At other institutions
Diane Lillo-Martin	Ronice Müller de Quadros	Deanna Gagne	Jonathan Bobaljik
Sabine Laszakovits	Marilyn Mafra Klamt	Deborah Chen Pichler	Susanne Wurmbrand
Linghui (Eva) Gan		Melissa Avino	Emily Noschese
Lily Kwok		Grace Keller	Kathryn Davidson
			Karen Emmorey

Presentations

Quadros, Ronice Müller de, Lillo-Martin, Diane, Polinsky, Maria & Emmorey, Karen (2016). Heritage signers: Bimodal bilingual structures. Poster presentation, Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition – North America (GALANA) 7; UIUC, Illinois; September 2016.

Quadros, Ronice Müller de, Davidson, Kathryn, Lillo-Martin, Diane & Emmorey, Karen (2017). Depicting Signs in Bimodal Bilingual Code Blending. Formal and Experimental Advances in Sign Language Theory (FEAST); University of Iceland, Reykjavik; June 2017.

Quadros, Ronice Müller de & Lillo-Martin, Diane (2017). Brazilian bimodal bilingual as heritage signers. Poster presentation, Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD); Boston, MA; November 2017.

Lillo-Martin, Diane (2017). Bimodal Bilingualism and the Architecture of the Language Faculty. Invited Keynote presentation, II Coloquio Internacional sobre la Lengua de Señas Peruana. Lima, Peru; November 9, 2017.

Lillo-Martin, Diane (2018). Code-blending in Bimodal Bilingual Children and Adults. Colloquium, Diversity in Language, Culture and Cognition; Max-Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics; Nijmegen, The Netherlands; March 8, 2018.

Lillo-Martin, Diane (2018). Constraints on Bimodal Code-switching and -blending. Colloquium, Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS); April 23, 2018.

Lillo-Martin, Diane (2019). Tap your Head and Rub your Tummy: How Complex can Simultaneous Production of Two Languages Get? Invited Plenary, Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting. New York, NY; January 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8U9olUwPn7E

Lillo-Martin, Diane, Quadros, Ronice, Bobaljik, Jonathan David, Gagne, Deanna, Kwok, Lily, Laszakovits, Sabine, Mafra, Marilyn & Wurmbrand, Susanne (2020). Constraints on code-blending: Evidence from acceptability judgments. Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting; New Orleans, LA; January 2020.

Lillo-Martin, Diane (2020). Heritage language characteristics of bimodal bilinguals. Plenary presentation; Annual Conference of the German Linguistics Association (DGfS); Hamburg, Germany; March 2020. (Invited for the Workshop on Linguistic diversity and linguistic modalities: New perspectives on bimodal (sign language/oral language) bilingualism). https://lecture2go.uni-hamburg.de/l2go/-/get/v/36745

Laszakovits, Sabine (with Quadros, Ronice Müller de, Noschese, Emily Jo & Lillo-Martin, Diane) (2022). Object shift in ASL and Libras. Colloquium, University of Salzburg; April 2022.

Quadros, Ronice Müller de, Klamt, Marilyn Mafra, Perniss, Pamela & Lillo-Martin, Diane. Visual cohesion in Coda multimodal productions. Poster presentation, International Conference on Sign Language Acquisition (ICSLA); Boston University / Online; June 2022.

Lillo-Martin, Diane (2022). Bimodal bilingual code-blending: Possibilities and constraints. Colloquium, University of Tromsø (UiT); June 2022.

Quadros, Ronice Müller de, Klamt, Marilyn Mafra, Perniss, Pamela & Lillo-Martin, Diane. Visual cohesion in Coda bimodal bilingual productions. Poster presentation, Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD); November 2022.

Publications

Quadros, Ronice Müller de & Lillo-Martin, Diane (2018). Brazilian bimodal bilinguals as heritage signers. Languages 3(3), 32. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages3030032

Quadros, Ronice Müller de, Davidson, Kathryn, Lillo-Martin, Diane & Emmorey, Karen (2020). Code blending speech with depicting signs. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 10(2), 290-308. https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.17043.qua

Quadros, Ronice Müller de, Lillo-Martin, Diane & Klamt, Marilyn Mafra (2020). Sobreposição de línguas: descrições linguísticas [Code blending: Linguistic descriptions]. In Ronice Müller de Quadros (Ed.), Fórum Linguístico (Dossiê Documentação de Libras) 17(4), 5464 –5482. Florianópolis, SC, Brazil. https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/forum/article/view/77231

Quadros, Ronice Müller de, Lillo-Martin, Diane, Klamt, Marilyn Mafra, & Pires, K.T. (2020). Estudos experimentais com bilíngues bimodais: aspectos metodológicos [Experimental studies with bimodal bilinguals: Methodological aspects]. Revista Linguí∫tica 16(3), 372-403. UFRJ. https://doi.org/10.31513/linguistica.2020.v16n3a33485

Laszakovits, Sabine, Quadros, Ronice Müller de, Noschese, Emily Jo & Lillo-Martin, Diane (to appear, 2022). Object shift in ASL and Libras. In Sabine Laszakovits & Zheng Shen (Eds.), The Size of Things II: Movement, Features, and Interpretation. Berlin: Language Science Press.

Lillo-Martin, Diane, Chen Pichler, Deborah & Gagne, Deanna (to appear, 2022). Lessons to be learned from bimodal bilingualism. Invited submission, special issue of the Croatian Review of Rehabilitation Research.

Quadros, Ronice Müller de, Lillo-Martin, Diane & Klamt, Marilyn Mafra (to appear, 2022). Blending Libras and Portuguese: Acceptability variables. Cilene Rodrigues and Andrés Saab (Eds.), Formal Approaches to Languages of South America. Springer.

Lillo-Martin, Diane, Gu, Shengyun, Kozak, L. Viola & Chen Pichler, Deborah (to appear, 2023). The phonology of bimodal bilinguals. Invited submission; Mark Amengual (Ed.), Cambridge Handbook of Bilingual Phonetics and Phonology.