Mouthing e mouth gesture nella lingua dei segni italiana. Descrizione, consapevolezza e acquisizione di un fenomeno ubiquo, complesso e dibattuto

What and how do signers labialize in the act of signing? Is labialization related to the interface between form and rhythm of the sign? What do signers think about this phenomenon? Are oral components considered in LIS (Italian Sign Language) teaching? These are some of the ques- tions that we posed and attempted to answer. To shed light on such a controversial phenomenon, a questionnaire was designed and disseminated online. It involved over 273 deaf and hearing signers from all over Italy. The purpose of the questionnaire was to investigate the perception and aware- ness of the phenomenon in order to define teaching practices that could be adopted in Italian sign language courses. The results led us to consider orality in LIS as a complex, ubiquitous and heterogeneous phe- nomenon, which by some signers is still looked upon with suspicion and as a matter of controversy within the signers’ community. Although unstable and often redundant, the oral component is often a functional, discreet phenomenon, coordinated with the movement of the manual component in an articulatory cluster involving the whole signer’s body. In consideration of the fact that oral com- ponents perform very similar functions to those of co-verbal gestures in vocal languages, since they convey morpho-syntactic, pragmatic, textual and meta-discursive functions in signed languages, we maintain that this should be prominently reflected in LIS teaching.