Dr. Joseph Hill

Dr. Joseph Hill is an assistant professor in the Specialized Educational Services department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Dr. Hill is a coordinator of the American Sign Language (ASL) Teacher Licensure program that prepares pre-service teachers for ASL teaching in secondary schools. He was born deaf and raised in Cincinnati, OH with the family of deaf and hard-of-hearing siblings and a hard-of-hearing mother.
Like his brothers and sisters, he attended public school as a mainstream student. In 2001, he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Systems Analysis from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. In May 2011, he earned his doctorate degree in ASL linguistics from Gallaudet University in Washington D.C. Prior to the completion of the doctoral program, he held various roles as a graduate student: a National Science Foundation Graduate Research fellow; a Fulbright scholar in Italy; an adjunct linguistics instructor at Gallaudet University; a summer instructor of the Deaf Studies department in the Siena School for Liberal Arts in Italy; and a research assistant in the Gallaudet Research Institute and the Black ASL research team.

Language Attitudes in the American Deaf Community

This paper is an exploratory study of the perceptions of linguistic features in different forms of signing, e.g., ASL, contact signing, and Signed English, (henceforth called signing types) among the social groups of the American Deaf community that vary based on generation, age of acquisition, and race. The basic research question is: What are the linguistic and social factors that govern attitudes toward signing in the American Deaf community? The paper addresses the research question with four different studies: the perceptions of signing types; the effects of social information on the perceptions of signing types; the evaluation of signing; and the description of signing. 

The overall findings are as follow: the Deaf subjects in different social groups were able to differentiate the signing types but some social groups perceived the non-ASL signing type differently from the other social groups; certain social characteristics of Deaf signers produced a significant effect on the subjects’ perception of signing to some extent; the subjects were more favorable to ASL than Mixed or Signed English based on the evaluative scales related to language and social aspects; and the subjects were able to discuss the forms and features of signing that led them to perceive it as ASL, Mixed, or Signed English but some of their comments were contradictory or unexpected. The general attitude about ASL is more positive today than it was at the time William Stokoe published his influential linguistic work on ASL in 1960s, but based on the subjects’ discussion of ASL forms and features, the knowledge of ASL structure is not as standardized, although most younger subjects are more familiar with the structure than are some older subjects. 

Black ASL: A Historical and Linguistic Overview

Provides an overview of a historical and linguistic project on Black ASL. The goals of the project are 1) to determine if specific linguistic features could be identified to characterize the signing of the Black Deaf community as a distinct variety of American Sign Language (ASL), and  2) to describe the socio-historical reality that would make the emergence of this variety possible. Education was not allowed for Black deaf children in the South until 1869, when the first school was opened in Raleigh, North Carolina. Sixteen other southern states and the District of Columbia established schools for Black deaf children. Most resisted the integration mandated by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, finally allowing desegregation in the mid-1960s, with Louisiana desegregating in 1978. This socio-historical reality allowed for the emergence of a distinct variety of ASL. We filmed free conversations and interviews with a total of 96 signers in 6 of the 17 states -  North Carolina, Alabama, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana and Virginia. The signers included individuals over the age of 55 who, by definition, attended segregated schools, and individuals under the age of 35, who attended integrated and/or mainstreamed schools, such that their white classmates might have been both deaf and hearing. The analysis identified a number of linguistic features that distinguish this variety, including 2-handed signs like WANT which can be produced one-handed, signs like KNOW produced at the forehead which can be lowered, the size of the signing space, constructed action and constructed dialogue (role shifting), the use of lexical and phrasal repetition, mouthing, the borrowing of words and phrases from spoken Black English into Black ASL, and vocabulary differences. The analysis also shows that, as a result of integration and mainstreaming, the variety is changing.