Wan, Tsung-Lun Alan; Hall-Lew, Lauren; & Cowie, Claire (2024). Feeling disabled: Vowel quality and assistive hearing devices in embodying affect. Language in Society 53(1):71–97.
| Wan, Hall-Lew & Cowie (2024) |
Previous research has proposed that phonetic variation may index affect prior to indexing other social meanings. This study explores whether the affective indexicality of vowels identified in previous studies can also be observed among deaf or hard-of-hearing speakers, in this case, speakers of Taiwan Mandarin. The results suggest that =i= backing is invoked to signal negative affect. This study also demonstrates how assistive devices like hearing aids and cochlear implants can be considered semiotic resources. For deaf or hard-of-hearing speakers, assistive hearing devices enter into a process of bricolage with linguistic and other symbolic resources, generating new potentials for the embodiment of affect.
Wan, Tsung-Lun Alan (2023). Topic-based variation as both cognitive and agentive: Identity politics, deaf speakers, and hearing researcher. Asia-Pacific Language Variation 9(1):1–28.
| Wan (2023) |
Topic-based style-shifting refers to the variation pattern that, when people talk about a topic, they shift to a linguistic style which is associated with the topic. Most of the research on topic-based variation in read speech have not taken stance-taking into consideration. This study argues that stance-taking needs to be included in the analysis of topic-based variation, for reading something aloud is a practice where individuals engage with the message communicated in a text. This study looks at the socially salient variable /ʂ/ in Taiwan Mandarin, and how deaf speakers exploit this variable to perform their stances towards a passage concerned with the political relationship between hearing people and deaf signers. The findings show that participants who demonstrate a stance of deaf solidarity diverge from standard speech styles in their repertoires when reading the deaf passage.
Wan, Tsung-Lun Alan (2022). Individual variation in performing read-aloud speech among deaf speakers. Linguistics Vanguard 8(1):291–303.
| Wan (2022) |
The study examines the stylistic variation (interview vs. passage-reading) of socially meaningful variables among orally educated deaf speakers of Mandarin in Taipei, Taiwan. I examine the use of the retroflex and alveolar fricatives across two groups: deaf persons who received speech therapy or training, and those who did not receive speech medicalization. The two groups acquire the metalinguistic awareness of sibilant variation in different ways. Results show that the former group utilize the variables in the same way as hearing persons do – increasingthedegreeofretroflexion in reading-aloud speech. The latter group engage with the variable in an opposite way – decreasingthedegreeofretroflexion, which nevertheless also indexes able-bodiedness, possibly via the embodied link between a stronger hiss and a fronted sibilant. I argue that we need to carefully look at what different linguistic variants index through locating the variants in each speaker’s personal history.
Wan, Tsung-Lun Alan (2021). Sociolinguistics of pathologized speech: A case of deaf and hard-of-hearing speakers of Taiwan Mandarin. Journal of Sociolinguistics 25(3):438–52.
| Wan (2021) |
Speakers of pathologized speech have not received much attention from sociolinguists. This article explores the stylistic practices of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) people who demonstrate pathologized variants. This article adopts minimal pair reading and story reading to elicit various stylistic practices, as part of a larger project that aims to describe and empower DHH speech. Results show that DHH speakers who have experiences of medicalization are also the ones who consider learning the speech of hearing people necessary. A portion of these speakers embody their ideological stance—converging towards hearing speech—in the minimal pair reading.
Without critical interrogation, linguists will continue to reify existing structures of ableism and with it, other structures of oppression by reinforcing modality (and by extension, other forms of linguistic) chauvinism.
--- Henner and Robinson (2023: p.10)
Wan, Tsung-Lun Alan (2021). Formulating (dis)ability: Discursive construction of cochlear implant satisfaction. In Jessica Nina Lester (ed.), Discursive Psychology and Disability, 169–97. Springer International Publishing.
| Wan (2021) |
In medical discourses, cochlear implants have been positioned as assistive hearing devices that are designed to restore the hearing of deaf people. However, cochlear implants have also been criticized as being a product of phonocentrism that colonizes deaf bodies. Medically-oriented studies evaluating ‘personal attitudes’ toward cochlear implants have frequently reported that users are satisfied with their cochlear implants. Taking a Critical Discursive Psychology approach, this chapter instead demonstrates how preference for the cochlear implants should be understood as a construct that is normalized in everyday talk. By attending to the analytic tools of interpretative repertoires and imaginary positions, this chapter illustrates how the discursive differentiation between hearing aids and cochlear implants contributes to the formulations of hearing aid users as more disabled and cochlear implant users as more abled.
萬宗綸（2021）。電子耳與「聽」的展演：社會語言學的取徑。科技、醫療與社會 33:167–94.
| 萬宗綸（2021） |
在臺灣，治癒耳聾的醫療腳本佔據了談論人工電子耳此一科技物的 主流意識形態 ，除了聽損孩童依個人條件會植入電子耳進行早期療育 外，不少成人聽損者也追求人工電子耳植入術 ，以期待能變得更像聽力健全者 。本文從社會語言學的學科傳統出發 ，透過討論一位成人電子耳 植入者的案例 ，描繪華語的語音系統被其挪用作為展演電子耳有效性的身體風格元素 ，指出使用電子耳後的「 口語改善 」應被理解為電子耳植 入者體現其勵志障礙者人設的身體實踐 ，而非單純生理物理上的科技物 輔助結果 。
