Email: hmorga01@campus.haifa.ac.il
Post-doctoral researcher. I completed my PhD at the University of California San Diego in 2017, writing a phonological grammar of Kenyan Sign Language. My research primarily focuses on the systemic properties of sign language lexicons, guided by the following questions. How do signs emerge and take on categorical formational properties in relation to other signs in a lexicon? How are those forms constrained by communicative and learnability pressures, such as confusability, frequency, articulatory ease, and phonological complexity? And how do meanings become encoded in form within a lexical network, at both the level of surface lexical meaning (tiptoe, wolf, Paris, heretofore), as well as in the motivated sub-parts of words, including iconic motivations and metaphoric reference?
I am deaf with deaf parents, and therefore Israeli Sign Language is my mother tongue.
In my work as a research assistant I learn new and interesting things about my mother tongue that I never knew before. At the moment, I am studying interactive communication design and social sciences at the Technion, Haifa. In the Bilingual-Bimodal project, I am responsible for developing the linguistic coding, recruiting families and administering the assessments in Israeli Sign Language.
