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There are currently three major research projects underway by members of SLING.

1. The Auslan Archive and Corpus Project (Trevor Johnston, on-going). Initial collection and archiving funded by the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Documentation Programme, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London (#MDP0088, 2004-2007).

This is a project to record, document, selectively transcribe and annotate naturalistic, controlled and elicited signed language samples from deaf native users of Auslan. Language recording sessions were conducted between 2004 and 2006 involving one hundred deaf native signers of Auslan (twenty participants in each of five sites). The sessions included a one-on-one interview, an elicited personal narrative, narrative productions elicited by viewing a stimulus video and a cartoon story, a barrier task, shadowing of another participant’s signed utterances, the re-telling in Auslan of a story signed in Auslan and seen for the first time, and free group conversation. These secure digital video recordings are serving as the basis for on-going corpus-based descriptions of key morphological, syntactic and discourse features of the language. It will be archived at SOAS and Macquarie University.

2. The linguistic use of space in Auslan: semantic roles and grammatical relations in three dimensions (Louise de Beuzeville & Trevor Johnston). Funded by an ARC Discovery grant and fellowship: #DP0665254, 2006-2009.

This project is using data from the Auslan corpus to investigate the use of space as a grammatical coding device in referent tracking and in the identification of semantic roles. We are particularly looking for evidence that grammatical relations, such as ‘subject’, exist and are encoded (spatially) in Auslan and if the presence or absence of such spatially modified signs is influenced by the use of constructed action (‘role shift’).

3. Medical Signbank: sign language planning and development in interpreter-mediated medical and mental health care delivery for deaf Australians (Trevor Johnston, Jemina Napier, Keri Gilbert, Vesna Dragoje). Funded by an ARC Linkage grant: #LP0882270, 2008-2010.

Medical Signbank will establish an effective, shared and standardized sign language vocabulary for the discussion of medical and mental health issues by deaf clients and health professionals—mediated through Australian Sign Language (Auslan) interpreters—so as to improve the health outcomes of this socially and economically disadvantaged group of people. This will be in the form of an internet-based lexicon and encyclopaedic dictionary (“Medical Signbank”). The interactive internet-based dictionary and database on Auslan and English medical and mental health terminology will bring together sign language interpreters and their deaf clients, as well as interested health care service providers, allowing feedback from all stakeholders and most importantly, enhance interpreter-mediated service encounters. The National Auslan Interpreter Booking and Payment Service (NABS) and the NSW Healthcare Interpreting Service are the two industry partners. This collaboration between academic linguists, interpreter service providers, health care providers, sign language interpreters, and the Deaf community will improve the recent initiatives to give deaf people equity in their access to health care services.

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