Sara Goico

Sara Goico is a graduate student in Anthropology at UC San Diego and is interested in how research on homesigners can provide information on the origins and evolution of language. Homesigners are deaf individuals who have grown up isolated from other deaf individuals and sign languages. In order to communicate, they develop idiosyncratic gesture systems known as homesigns. How different are these homesigns across individuals?  How complex can homesigns become when a language model is not present? How do homesigns vary across contexts and interlocutors? Homesigns provide one of a limited set of opportunities to study the birth of a communication system in human population. Sara’s current research takes place in Iquitos, Peru, to investigate a handful of homesigners in inclusion classrooms.  This pedagogical philosophy perpetuates homesign because deaf students are placed in separate regular education classrooms with all hearing students.