**3. Methods**

In this section, we give an overview of the sign language communities under investigation: KQSL and ISL. Following this, we describe the methods in this study including details about participants, stimuli, procedure, and data coding and analysis.

#### *3.1. Communities under Investigation*

Israel is home to several smaller sign language communities—in Kufr Qassem, Al-Sayyid, Abu Kaf, Ein Mahel, and Arab Al-Naim among others, all of which emerged in the early 20th century in what is known today as Israel (see Figure 1). Kufr Qassem is a Palestinian–Arab town which has existed for hundreds of years, situated in the Southern Triangle area in Central Israel, around 20 km northeast of Tel-Aviv. As a result of the relatively high incidence of hereditary deafness in Kufr Qassem, a local village sign language, known as Kufr Qassem Sign Language (KQSL), emerged around 90 years ago. It is claimed that this sign language arose when a deaf woman from the Negev area married a hearing man from Kufr Qassem and they had deaf children together (Kafr Qasem Sign Language Dictionary—Sign Language Research Lab 2013). The deafness gene was passed on from one generation to the next and, gradually, the deaf population grew from 12 in the 1960s to 30 in the 1970s. With the increasing deaf population came the necessity for a class for deaf children, which was opened in 1979 in the local school in Kufr Qassem (Kafr Qasem Sign Language Dictionary—Sign Language Research Lab 2013). In 1985, ISL was introduced to the deaf class when a teacher competent in ISL joined the class. Today, of its 23,000 residents (Central Bureau of Statistics: Kfar Qassem 2019), approximately 120 are deaf, spanning four generations (Sarsour 2020). Deaf and hearing people sign with varying degrees of proficiency.

Over the last fifty years, there have been significant changes in the social mobility and educational policies for deaf children across Israel, including in Kufr Qassem. Deaf people from the first generation of KQSL signers, now elderly members of the community, did not attend school and therefore remained relatively uninfluenced from other signed and spoken languages6. Some deaf signers of the second generation attended the first deaf class in Kufr Qassem. Others attended the deaf class after 1985 when a teacher competent in ISL joined the class, and therefore they were exposed to ISL within the classroom (Kafr Qasem Sign Language Dictionary—Sign Language Research Lab 2013). Recent studies show that changes are taking place in the signing behavior of the first- and second-generation deaf signers in Kufr Qassem (Jaraisy 2021; Stamp and Jaraisy 2021). While the first- and second-generation of deaf signers are predominantly KQSL monolinguals, their signing behavior shows evidence of language contact phenomena such as code-switching and lexical borrowing from ISL (an average of 15% of the overall lexical signs produced) (Jaraisy 2021; Stamp and Jaraisy 2021). Third and fourth generations of deaf people in Kufr Qassem are exposed to ISL at school and in the wider deaf community, within the medical, sports, legal, and interpreting services, as well as social media. Moreover, younger deaf people are also exposed to other languages, including Arabic (Colloquial Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic), Hebrew, and English. Mostly through international travel and social media (e.g., TV, internet, Twitter), some young signers are exposed to other signed languages used in different countries—such as ASL, BSL, etc. Despite this, signers are exposed to these sign languages intermittently and in some cases without interaction (e.g., television). For this study, we do not examine the effects of exposure to other signed languages, used predominantly outside of Israel, on the signing behavior of the young signers of Kufr Qassem deaf community, although this may be of interest for future studies.

**Figure 1.** Map of Israel with the locations of several sign language communities.

Today, younger deaf people in Kufr Qassem are multilingual in several sign languages, as well as written and spoken languages. In this study, we explore the effect of language contact between KQSL and ISL on sign language use and preferences among KQSL-ISL deaf sign-bilinguals. While ISL and KQSL are estimated to be of the same age, the sociolinguistic situation of each community is vastly different, as outlined in Section 2. ISL is a deaf community sign language which arose with the formation of the deaf community in Israel in the 1930s. It is often dated to the establishment of the first school for the deaf set up in 1932 in Jerusalem. Previous studies have likened the emergence of ISL to the process of creolization because of the influence of many different signing systems on the lexicon of ISL, including signs from Germany and other European countries, but also from Morocco, Algeria, and Egypt (Aronoff et al. 2008; Sandler 2013). Today, ISL is widely used by around 10,000 signers (Kastner et al. 2014). In contrast, KQSL is an example of a village sign language used by a much smaller population. Despite their shared geography and age, KQSL and ISL are historically unrelated. A lexical comparison study conducted by Kastner et al. (2014) confirmed that KQSL is independent from ISL and also ABSL. Table 3 presents a comparison of the characteristics of ISL and KQSL.


