Language Sciences
Principle Investigator, Sign Language Research Lab
Education
Ph.D. University of Chicago
Research Interests
Laura’s research focuses on sign languages, including American Sign Language (ASL) and local family sign languages, or shared homesign systems, used in a community in Guatemala where she has worked since 2013. Her research program focuses on language socialization, lexical variation, and the acquisition of pragmatic skills like turn-taking. Her work documents the strategies signing people use to navigate multimodal communication and language development in socio-communicative contexts with variable access to language. These contexts include elementary school classrooms in the United States and home settings characterized by diverse combinations of signing and speaking.
Teaching
Ling 213: Topics in Sociolinguistics – Inventing Languages
Ling 213: Topics in Sociolinguistics – Language Emergence
Ling 375: Sign Language Linguistics
Ling 690: Capstone in Linguistics – Linguistic Relativity
Website
Selected Publications
- Horton, Laura, and James Waller. The Pragmatics of Gaze Patterns in a Local Family Sign Language from Guatemala. Languages 9: 223. doi: https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9060223
- Conversational Repair in a Local Family Sign Language from Guatemala. Sign Language Studies 24(3), 513-547. https://doi.org/10.1353/sls.2024.a928055
- Horton, Laura, Lynn Hou, Austin German, and Jenny Singleton. Sign Language Socialization and Participant Frameworks in Three Indigenous Mesoamerican Communities. Research on Children and Social Interaction 7(2), 288-319. https://doi.org/10.1558/rcsi.24314
- Goico, Sara and Laura Horton. Homesign: Contested Issues. The Annual Review of Linguistics 9, 377–98. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-030521060001.
- Laura Horton and Jenny Singleton. Acquisition of Turn-Taking in Sign Language Conversations: An Overview of Language Modality and Turn Structure. Frontiers in Psychology. 13:935342. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.935342
- Lexical Overlap in Young Sign Languages from Guatemala. Glossa 7(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5829
- Seeing Signs: Linguistic Ethnography and Language Socialization in the Study of Homesign Systems in Guatemala. Sign Language Studies, 20 (4), 644-664.
- Representational Strategies for Symbolic Communication in Shared Homesign Systems from Nebaj, Guatemala. In Olivier Le Guen, Josefina Safar, & Marie Coppola (Eds.), Emerging Sign Languages of the Americas (97-154). De Gruyter: Ishara Press.
- Shared Homesign Systems in Nebaj, Guatemala: A Sociolinguistic Sketch. In Olivier Le Guen, Josefina Safar, & Marie Coppola (Eds.), Emerging Sign Languages of the Americas (401-412). De Gruyter: Ishara Press.
- Horton, Laura, Lilia Rissman, Susan Goldin-Meadow, and Diane Brentari. The Emergence of Agent-Marking Strategies in Child Homesign. Proceedings from the Chicago Linguistics Society 53.
- Horton, Laura, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Marie Coppola, Ann Senghas and Diane Brentari. Forging a morphological system out of two dimensions: Agentivity and number. Open Linguistics, 1, 596-613.