Acquisition and use of visual/gestural and aural/oral bilingualism: A phenomenological study on bilingualism and deafness

This research starts with a review of the literature on language acquisition and bilingualism followed by a descriptive phenomenology on the experience of acquiring and using bimodal bilingualism. In this study, bimodal bilingualism refers to a visual/gestural language like American Sign Language (ASL) and an aural/oral language like English or French. Even though English or French may be written, printed, fingerspelled or signed with the incorporation of visual cues like body language and facial expression, it is still an aural/oral language. Its syntax remains essentially intact. ASL is primarily signed and seen/perceived, and it is a visual/gestural language. How a language is used in a normal interactive social situation determines whether it is aural/oral or visual/gestural in nature. English is typically spoken and heard while ASL is signed and seen. In this study, bimodal bilingualism refers to English and ASL. English and French are considered as examples of unimodal bilingualism mainly because these are primarily spoken and heard. Although the bilingual experiences of deaf individuals are the main data subjected for analysis in this study, the bilingual experiences of hearing individuals are also included. This study involves four deaf ASL/English bilinguals, one hearing French/English bilingual and one hearing English/ASL bilingual as co-researchers to provide and validate transcriptions of their experience-based data on their acquisition and use of bilingualism. This study is based on the speculation that the experience of acquiring bimodal bilingualism by the deaf is similar to that of unimodal bilingualism of hearing individuals. Unimodal bilingualism, in this paper, refers to two languages which are primarily spoken and heard in social interactions. English and ASL are chosen as example languages in this research simply because they are readily available within the physical proximity of myself as a research-author. Readers are encouraged to hypothesize that experience-based structures of bilingualism are universal among all bilinguals. For instance the lived-experiences of acquisition and use of Langue Signes du Quebecois (LSQ) and spoken French would be similar. This study also encourages awareness of visually-emphasized Deaf Culturalism. Instead of restricting the deaf students to the values of the hearing people, they should be allowed to learn and appreciate their visually-based values at home and school.