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SIGN LANGUAGE RESEARCHERS over the past few decades have begun investigating language variation in American Sign Language (ASL) with regard to gender (Mansfield 1993), social status, region, age, and ethnicity (Lucas, Bayley, and Valli 2001; McCaskill et. al., 2011), to name just a few areas of study However, the impact of technology on the possible standardization of ASL has not been explored.Videophones and video-relay technology, which were introduced in the early twenty-first century, allow Deaf people to connect with each other via live video feed by means of a high-speed Internet connection. Deaf people can now make direct phone calls to each other via the videophones, or they may use the videophone to connect to an interpreter who will interpret their calls to hearing people. This new technology has allowed Deaf people to become more connected to each other and to the larger hearing community regardless of geographic location. By frequendy using this toll-free service to make phone calls to other videophone users across the country, members of the Deaf community also increase their exposure to variation in ASL. Therefore, variants that once were confined by regional boundaries or areas bound by the tight knit communities associated with residential state schools for Deaf, now have the potential for greater use due to the increased virtual mobility of signers via the videophone. Additionally, Deaf users utilize video-relay services (VRS) and come in contact with sign language interpreters around the country, thereby increasing their exposure to sign variants. Familiarity with regional variation and the interpreters' level of skill are two possible factors that encourage Deaf consumers to omit or limit their usage of local or regional variants and to replace them with forms more commonly used by VRS interpreters. This study examines a variety of ways in which the interaction between video-relay interpreters and Deaf consumers may be contributing to the standardization of lexical items in ASL.
The first telephone to include a video screen was the Picturephone, developed by AT&T in the early 1960s. The phone never gained widespread popularity due to the high cost of the equipment and the monthly service fees (Noll 1997, 27). Within the past decade, video conferencing on mobile devices has become popular, especially in countries that had early universal mobile...