Julia Weisenberg, Lecturer
Ph.D. 2009, Stony Brook University
More recently, I have been examining foreign-to-foreign Deaf interactions with ASL and Russian Sign Language (РЖЯ) in an effort to understand the mimetic efficiency of the mouth against the backdrop of theories of language evolution. While non-manual behaviors such as mouthing in Deaf and hearing population has been my primary focus, I also have conducted inquiries into video-relay technology and how this new real-time medium affects relations between interpreters and deaf callers, corporate policy and workplace language, and neologisms in ASL phone discourse.
I have also begun an exploration of online gaming and 'game-speak' (leet-speak) and patterns of non-gamer versus game-specific usage. These pursuits have been inspired by my participation for the last four years in the Gesture Focus Group of Stony Brook University, and have fostered a particular interest in how technology affects communication in signed and spoken languages.