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Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education Advance Access originally published online on August 4, 2006
The Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 2006 11(4):403-409; doi:10.1093/deafed/enl008
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Laughter Among Deaf Signers

Robert R. Provine

University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Karen Emmorey

San Diego State University

The placement of laughter in the speech of hearing individuals is not random but "punctuates" speech, occurring during pauses and at phrase boundaries where punctuation would be placed in a transcript of a conversation. For speakers, language is dominant in the competition for the vocal tract since laughter seldom interrupts spoken phrases. For users of American Sign Language, however, laughter and language do not compete in the same way for a single output channel. This study investigated whether laughter occurs simultaneously with signing, or punctuates signing, as it does speech, in 11 signed conversations (with two to five participants) that had at least one instance of audible, vocal laughter. Laughter occurred 2.7 times more often during pauses and at phrase boundaries than simultaneously with a signed utterance. Thus, the production of laughter involves higher order cognitive or linguistic processes rather than the low-level regulation of motor processes competing for a single vocal channel. In an examination of other variables, the social dynamics of deaf and hearing people were similar, with "speakers" (those signing) laughing more than their audiences and females laughing more than males.

1 This sociolinguistic study was supported by the National Science Foundation grants 9310116 and 9809522.

Correspondence should be sent to Robert R. Provine, Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD 21250 (e-mail: provine{at}umbc.edu) or Karen Emmorey, Laboratory for Language and Cognitive Neuroscience, School of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, San Diego State University, 6495 Alvarado Road #200, San Diego, CA 92120 (e-mail: kemmorey{at}mail.sdsu.edu).

Received April 28, 2006; revised June 22, 2006; accepted June 23, 2006


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