Faces: The Relationship Between Language and Affect

Abstract

It has often been remarked that a signer’s face behaves very differently from that of a person who is speaking. For many first-time observers, signers’ faces appear to pass through a rapid series of grimaces and contortions. Why should this be so? In American Sign Language (ASL), facial behaviors function in two distinct ways: to convey emotion (as with spoken languages) and to mark certain specific grammatical structures. This dual functioning in ASL of similar facial behaviors presents a natural test case to explore the relationship between language and affect. Research on affect and its development suggests that certain specific facial expressions for basic emotions are universal and that children consistently use them by the age of 1 year. The subsequent acquisition of grammatical facial behaviors in ASL, then, provides a unique opportunity to examine how presumable innate behaviors, affective facial displays, come under voluntary control and are reorganized for linguistic purposes. Two logical questions which arise are: (a) how does a deaf baby learning ASL acquire these grammatical facial markings; and (b) what role, if any, do prelinguistically productive affective facial expressions play in their acquisition? Before we look at the acquisition data, it might be helpful to review aspects of the structure of a signed language, describe the role of facial expression in ASL, and then to present some background on affective facial expression and its development.