Tory Sampson - Research

Research

Grammaticalization in sign languages

In my dissertation, I took a novel approach to combining historical and contemporary corpora to investigate a grammaticalization process in ASL. This work described the grammaticalization of the sign SELF, transitioning from a deictic to a demonstrative, pronoun, and copula, along a pathway also observed in spoken languages (“the copular cycle”). As a Deaf native signer, I recognized that SELF’s contemporary function did not align with previous claims that it was a reflexive or emphatic pronoun. Motivated by this discrepancy, I retraced its historical forms and developed a reconstruction of its grammaticalization.

I leveraged dictionary entries and films of early 20th-century ASL as well as 19th-century French Sign Language materials to reconstruct SELF’s development, starting with a sign compound of a human being classifier and a deictic point. Subsequent historical comparisons of the syntactic environments in the early ASL films and contemporary ASL films dating to the 2020s revealed a shift from pronominal to copular uses over time. This demonstrates that as ASL aged, it displayed language change patterns parallel to spoken languages, showing increased arbitrariness that departed from its more iconic origins. A series of experimental studies confirmed SELF’s copular function, as it was consistently favored over other similar signs to appear with nominal and adjectival phrases that denoted more stative (time-stable) properties. This grammaticalization of SELF appears to reflect what I call the disentanglement of the signer: conventionalized strategies that reduce embodied expression and increase manualization, marking a transition from iconic to arbitrary means of language use. My ongoing work investigates SELF’s semantic implications on sentence interpretation and the signer’s stance, beliefs, and attitudes.

SELF

SELF-ONE

CHAIR

SIT

Morphophonological development of movement repetition in sign languages

How do sign languages evolve from iconic beginnings toward more arbitrary and systematic linguistic structures? I focus on movement repetition as a phonological parameter that frequently distinguishes verbs from related nouns; for example, SIT (single movement) versus CHAIR (repeated movement). This nominal–verbal contrast is found across multiple unrelated sign languages, suggesting a common underlying mechanism, yet the nature of this mechanism remains underexplored. Traditionally, repeated movement has been viewed as an iconic reflection of the temporal stability associated with nouns. However, perception studies show that hearing non-signers, who rely heavily on iconic interpretation, tend to associate repeated movements with actions rather than objects, contrary to sign language signers. This shift raises a central question: how did repeated movement come to index objects rather than action in the evolution of sign languages?

My research on noun–verb pairs in ASL demonstrates that so-called nominalizing reduplication is only semi-productive and not fully predictable, suggesting the influence of additional phonological and lexical factors. I propose that movement repetition in ASL reflects systematic lexical organization rather than purely morphological derivation. I outline two synergistic mechanisms that explain cross-linguistic patterns of movement repetition: (1) the reanalysis of iconic repeated actions as stable referential entities, and (2) modality-specific phonological preferences that shape the distribution of repeated movements. Together, these processes illuminate how sign languages' lexicons gradually lose iconic transparency while gaining morphophonological regularity, offering new insights into the broader dynamics of language change and lexical expansion. I aim to conduct typological studies across multiple sign languages that show these patterns.

Parental input and sign language acquisition

Another line of my research addresses how parental language input and visual attention strategies shape acquisition in ASL. Joint attention, a critical learning mechanism, has been said to occur when both the parent and child attend to an object while the parent may label the item, which is said to support child language learning. But because ASL learners must divide visual attention between a signer and a referent, in my research, I, along with my collaborators, help reconceptualize joint attention within a visual-language framework.

A related study investigates how Deaf parents’ language input influences children’s outcomes by examining both the quantity and quality of input, refining our understanding of parent–child interaction in a visual modality. Does the amount of signs or sentence complexity that the parent uses with their child affect the child's language development?

In addition, literature has shown that Deaf readers appear not to use spoken phonology when they read, so I am interested in the alternative reading pathways that Deaf learners use to learn how to read. In a recent co-authored publication, I advocate for phonics-based reading instruction imposed on Deaf students, arguing that such approaches can undermine rather than support literacy development when not adapted to the visual-linguistic experience of Deaf learners.

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