Disability and sociophonetic variation among deaf or hard-of-hearing speakers of Taiwan Mandarin

Abstract

Variationist sociolinguistics has not paid much attention to linguistically pathologised groups. This thesis studies pathologised speech from a third-wave variationist perspective, exploring how oral deaf or hard-of-hearing (D/HH) speakers of Taiwan Mandarin invoke variation in spoken Mandarin to embody hearingness or deafness.

This thesis is structured into three stand-alone journal articles bookended with introductory and conclusion chapters which tie them together in the broader picture of how disability can mobilise an agentive deployment of linguistic resources. This thesis starts with an examination of how pathologised speech has been approached in linguistics and discusses why we need a third-wave perspective, which foregrounds the agency of languagers, to make a valid sociolinguistic analysis of pathologised speech.

The first of the three articles is built upon one of the traditional sociolinguistic methods, minimal pair reading task, to explore how five D/HH speakers perform themselves while being highly conscious of their own speech. Different from how minimal pair reading task is usually adopted in linguistics, this study does not adopt minimal pair reading task to report what a standard speech is, for D/HH speakers. Instead, the participants are informed that their participation in the reading task is to make hearing people recognise D/HH speech, thereby empowering D/HH communities. Results show that while a large portion of the participants believe they should speak like hearing people to empower themselves, not all of them do so in the reading task. The results presented here call for a delicate inspection of the heterogeneity among D/HH people in how they view their relationship with society.

The second research reports the results of a "device-on/off'' experiment where 19 participants read aloud the same sentences with and without turning on their assistive devices. Different from how this experiment is usually used in clinical linguistics and audiology, this study takes speaker agency into consideration and considers auditory deprivation as a moment where the body is transformed into a disabled body. Half of the participants report they experience negative psychological feelings during auditory deprivation, while the others report they do not. With the affective displays, we learn that the change in vowel quality during auditory deprivation should not be considered completely driven by mechanistic processes. Instead, results show that participants who display negative affect toward auditory deprivation invoke a greater degree of /i/-backing that the others do, and the negative affective display should be understood as a microcosm of how the participants think of disability in general in everyday life.

The final of the three articles explores topic-based linguistic variation in passage reading. 10 participants read aloud two passages: one is not relevant to deaf people, and the other is on the identity politics of D/HH communities, in terms of how hearing people oppress D/HH signers in a fictional kingdom. Rather than seeing passage reading as an activity where speakers neutrally transform written text into spoken language, this study invites the participants to share their thoughts about the identity politics passage. Six of the participants discuss the passage from a third person point of view, distancing themselves from the radical viewpoint of identity politics; the other four participants instead take the opportunity to condemn audism and share experiences with audism. Results show that when reading the deaf people-relevant passage, the former group shift to variants which index hearingness in their stylistic repertoires, and the latter group shift to variants indexing deafness to perform solidarity.