Language Ecology and Modality in Turn-Taking Acquisition

The acquisition of turn-taking is pivotal to a child's pragmatic development; learning how and when to contribute and align with your interlocutor is a critical skill that enables smooth conversation.

Despite extensive research on the development of turn-taking in spoken languages, we know little about how this unfolds in sign languages.

Differences are likely as deaf children usually lack rich language models (ecology), and the visual-spatial nature of sign languages poses different challenges to manage visual attention (modality).

To address this gap, this project investigates turn-taking development in an exceptional context: a Balinese village characterized by high incidence of deafness and widespread use of the local sign language, Kata Kolok.

Here, children acquire Kata Kolok surrounded by a village of signing adults, providing an unparalleled opportunity to study how signing-rich ecologies shape turn-taking development in the visuo-spatial modality.

I conduct two complementary studies: First, I follow the developmental trajectory of turn-taking of deaf children across 1-4-years, comparing their practices to turn-taking practices used by the adult signers in their community.

For this, I draw on a unique interactive corpus of longitudinal naturalistic recordings of children who acquire Kata Kolok from their deaf caregivers from birth (KKCSC) and use a micro-level analysis of spontaneous conversations.

Second, I use an experimental spot-the-difference task to further tease apart how conversational setting affects turn-taking, examining whether age of conversation partners (child vs adult) and number of interlocutors (two vs three or more) affect turn-taking behaviour among adult and child Kata Kolok signers.

Merging threads from social interaction, sign language linguistics and language acquisition, the LETITIA project represents a paradigm shift in the study of sign language acquisition, grounding linguistic observations and analyses in real-world language use.