{"id":200481,"date":"2023-08-21T07:15:05","date_gmt":"2023-08-21T11:15:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=200481"},"modified":"2023-08-15T12:59:39","modified_gmt":"2023-08-15T16:59:39","slug":"meet-the-researcher-marie-coppola-clas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2023\/08\/meet-the-researcher-marie-coppola-clas\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet the Researcher: Marie Coppola, CLAS"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cMost of the time that you hear about the life cycle of languages in the world, they’re dying, because their habitats are going away. The communities who speak those languages are assimilating into a more majority language,\u201d says Marie Coppola, professor of psycholog<\/span>ical sciences <\/span>and linguistics.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou rarely hear about new languages <\/span>forming<\/span><\/i>, especially languages that don\u2019t have a lot of contact with other existing languages.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But that\u2019s what happened in Nicaragua in the late 1970s, when students enrolled at the country\u2019s newly established <\/span>centers for special education<\/span> began communicating with each other outside of class. These students, who previously had no contact with other deaf people, generated their own sign language organically.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Lengua de Se\u00f1as Nicarag\u00fcense (LSN, also known as <\/span>Nicaraguan Sign Language<\/span>) <\/span>would go on to become recognized as <\/span>one of Nicaragua\u2019s <\/span>official language<\/span>s<\/span> in 2009. Because of its newness, it is the only language in the world that researchers have been able to study from <\/span>its beginnings, with the very people who first created it.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This remarkable feature is what motivates Coppola to hop on a plane to Managua every year to follow up on the linguistic studies she began with Nicaraguan signers in the 1990s. Part of the research project, she says, is working closely with a group of Deaf Nicaraguans as they learn to collect language data and be involved in documenting their own language, \u201ca goal that we all share.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"A
Members of the Equipo Sordo (Deaf Team) wearing uniform shirts during data collection in Managua, Nicaragua.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While LSN <\/span>is an established <\/span>language in Nicaragua<\/span>, it is used only by those individuals who <\/span>become part of the Deaf community by <\/span>attend<\/span>ing <\/span>school with other deaf children<\/span> or<\/span> participating in their local adult Deaf association.<\/span> The vast majority of <\/span>d<\/span>eaf Nicaraguans are not part of that community, and instead develop their own personal systems of signs, known as \u201chomesign,\u201d to communicate with their families and the world around them.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt turns out that the younger you are when you begin interacting using a homesign, the better you understand it, which is characteristic of everything we know about first and second language acquisition,\u201d Coppola says. \u201cHomesigns are linguistic systems, and the properties they exhibit are linguistic properties. So while they may not have all of the properties we see in other systems of language, we can see from the way that homesigns are acquired how biological maturation affects your ability to create and learn a wide range of linguistic structures.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Comparing the linguistic structures\u00a0<\/span>of LSN\u00a0<\/span>with those of homesign, Coppola\u2019s current research explores how having access to a linguistic community shapes the development and acquisition of language. She has found that<\/span> signers<\/span> in the LSN community, through natural, everyday interactions,<\/span> were able to develop certain linguistic <\/span>features<\/span>, like<\/span> recursion<\/span><\/a>, that are found in (almost) all of the world\u2019s languages.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAll the community signers, because they interact with other signers who nearly always understand what they’re saying, will present the information in this way [using recursive structures]. But homesigners are very unused to people understanding them; their pragmatics are developing in a very different context,\u201d she explains. \u201cThey can\u2019t assume that their conversation partner can make the right connections between their words based on these kinds of embedded structural links within a sentence. It\u2019s like the homesigner and their conversation partners are navigating the meanings in a sentence using different maps.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

According to <\/span>the World Federation of the Deaf<\/span>, 70% of deaf people worldwide do not have adequate access to language, a phenomenon known as language deprivation. Language deprivation can take place when resources, like early diagnostic tests and deaf-inclusive schooling, are not available to parents of deaf children. It can also occur when parents <\/span>do not receive appropriate information or support<\/span> regarding the benefits of using <\/span>sign language to communicate with their children at home, even alongside spoken language, or when deaf children are enrolled<\/span> in programs that do not provide adequate exposure to communication that is accessible to them, such as exclusive focus on<\/span> spoken language with a child who does not hear it.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"A
Ivonne Morales Ru\u00edz and Danilo Morales Blanco, Deaf researchers from Nicaragua, and Kurt Gagne, a Deaf researcher from the US, present a poster together at the Association for Linguistic Typology conference in Austin, Texas, December 2022. Coppola’s collaborators Ann Senghas and Annemarie Kocab stand on the far right.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Many misconceptions about sign language and deaf education persist, contributing to the pandemic of language deprivation. Deaf advocacy and research seek to dispel them. Coppola is excited to report how some of her colleagues recently shattered some of these myths, including the idea that hearing parents are not able to learn sign language quickly enough to support the linguistic development of their deaf children (<\/span>they are<\/span><\/a>) and that learning sign language could hinder a child\u2019s ability to grasp spoken English (<\/span>it doesn\u2019t<\/span><\/a>).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Coppola is hearing and is a child of Deaf adults (CODA). She is adamant that the field should embrace the scholarship of Deaf academics, who face \u201cso many barriers to acquiring the credentials that you need, to do this research and to get the funding for this research.\u201d To this end, she has collaborated with and mentored prolific Deaf scholars like <\/span>Annemarie Kocab<\/span><\/a>, an incoming assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve benefited deeply from Deaf culture and the Deaf community from the day I was born,\u201d Coppola says. \u201cI feel a tremendous responsibility to use my time in a way that can support the Deaf community.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This passion has translated into several extracurricular pursuits for Coppola as well. She recently helped organize the second <\/span>SignFest<\/span><\/a> on the UConn Storrs campus, which saw sign language researchers and students from across the Northeast gather for a full day of research presentations and networking. UConn was a natural site to host the conference, with its prominent sign language experts including Coppola and<\/span> Diane Lillo-Martin<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Through future SignFests and other events, Coppola hopes to continue developing a regional sign language research community.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a lot of new young people getting involved, especially Deaf people,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m really looking forward to learning about all the ideas people have.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Coppola\u2019s language research with deaf people in Nicaragua sheds light on how linguistic structures and communities are formed<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":175,"featured_media":200487,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,2460,2467,156,2373,2076,2235],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2413],"class_list":["post-200481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-faculty","category-global-cultures-perspectives","category-profile","category-psychological-sciences","category-research","category-today-homepage"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-17 01:50:02","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200481"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":202790,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200481\/revisions\/202790"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/200487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200481"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=200481"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=200481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}