Sociolinguistic Variation in Mouthings in British Sign Language: A Corpus-Based Study.
Heidi Proctor, Kearsy Cormier
PMID 35903821WHAT IT FOUND
Mouthing in British Sign Language varies widely between individuals and signs, rather than being fixed.
Plain verbs attract mouthing more often than complex verbs. Signers in the south, women, and older adults mouthed more frequently than those in the north, men, and younger adults.
Key findings
01Mouthing was significantly more frequent with plain verbs (75%) than with non-plain verbs (59%), suggesting morphological complexity reduces mouthing.
02Signers in the south of the UK mouthed more frequently (68%) than those in the north (59%), and women mouthed more (67%) than men (60%).
03Younger signers (aged 16-35) produced significantly less mouthing (58%) than older participants (65%), indicating a possible decline in mouthing over time.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study compared conversation data in the south with personal narrative data in the north, so the regional difference in mouthing might be confounded by text-type rather than geography alone. Ethnicity was excluded from the analysis due to a small number of non-White participants, limiting generalizability across ethnic groups. Social class could not be analyzed separately because it is tied to age and educational history in the UK deaf community. The study focused only on verb signs, so findings may not apply to nouns or other grammatical categories.
Declared interests
Funding was provided by the Economic and Social Research Council of Great Britain. No conflicts of interest were declared.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the regional difference in mouthing as a pure geographic effect. The study compared conversation tasks in the south with narrative tasks in the north, and text-type is known to influence mouthing rates. The observed difference could be due to the task rather than the location.