Some words need the listener’s hands

A tree in the listener’s hand

In a public explanation of protactile, John Lee Clark describes a cat approaching a tree, climbing its trunk and exploring its branches. The tree is Jelica Nuccio’s hand. Clark has prompted her to form it so he can build the description through touch. Nuccio is receiving the account, and her hand is helping produce it. [S05]

That arrangement has rules. In some protactile constructions, the person receiving an expression supplies part of its physical form. The contributions of both people become coordinated and predictable. The language has jobs for the listener’s hands. [S01, S02]

This developed within a wider change led by DeafBlind people: taking authority over how communication should happen. Their choices about access helped reshape the language itself. [S02, S04]

A hand with a linguistic job

Researchers Terra Edwards and Diane Brentari studied descriptions of objects including lollipops and toys. One person felt an object and described it to a partner. In a lollipop description, the recipient’s arm represented the cylindrical stick. The speaker prompted that position, maintained it with one hand and traced the arm with the other. The recipient’s body supplied a meaningful part of the construction. [S01]

Linguists call these proprioceptive constructions. Proprioception is the sense of the position and movement of your own body. It lets the recipient perceive the shape they are making from within, alongside the contact they feel. A hand or arm can represent a plane, a cylinder or a sphere, ready for the speaker to elaborate. [S01, S02]

One person is mainly conveying information and the other mainly receiving it, but both help form the expression. The recipient’s other hand can track the speaker’s movements and provide feedback. The four hands do different jobs. [S02]

The social conditions came first

In their account of protactile’s development, DeafBlind educators aj granda and Jelica Nuccio describe a practical problem at Seattle’s DeafBlind Service Center in 2007. They wanted direct group conversations with their colleague Jackie Engler. Existing arrangements pushed them toward interpreters or separate conversations in pairs. [S04]

They organized opportunities for DeafBlind people to teach one another and establish their own communication practices. Cooking classes, workshops and ordinary interaction gave those practices room to develop. granda and Nuccio explicitly reject the idea that they invented protactile as someone might invent an interpreting technique. Their role included creating opportunities, naming emerging practices and advocating for them. [S04]

Reciprocity was central. In protactile settings, touch became the shared norm, including for participants who could see. DeafBlind people could decide how information moved through their own spaces. These communities already had language, including American Sign Language. What changed was how people could build on one another’s tactile experience. [S04, S06]

Small movements take on different work

A tap can signal continued attention. Another can direct attention to an object. In the 2021 study, Edwards and Brentari distinguished four kinds of taps, including one that requests the recipient’s participation in producing an expression. Its job is to coordinate the hands that will make the next part possible. [S02]

The researchers traced changes across recordings from 2010 to 2018. Because so few people took part, they used the counts to describe what they saw and did not treat them as statistical tests. They argue that habits of attending to another person, repeated over time, became part of the language's grammar. [S02]

By the vocabulary sessions reported in a 2026 paper, locations on the recipient’s hand and wrist distinguished related time words. The authors analyzed minimal pairs: words with different meanings that differ in just one part of their form. Such distinctions belong to phonology, the organization of a language’s smaller units, whether its channel is sound, vision or touch. [S03, S06]

One correction in that paper is especially revealing. Researchers initially thought two travel expressions differed through contact versus no contact with the recipient’s arm. A participant clarified that the distinction was contact with skin versus the tips of arm hair. What they had taken for an absence of contact was a different kind of contact. The person using the language supplied the distinction the researchers had missed. [S03]

Who gets to set the terms

The evidence comes from small, selected groups, with overlapping participants and different recording conditions. The 2026 vocabulary work began with two experienced speakers, one teaching the other unfamiliar forms, followed by a session with one participant. It documents those speakers’ contrasts without establishing how widely every new word is shared. The papers are connected stages of research, rather than three independent replications. [S01, S02, S03]

DeafBlind people also have different sensory experiences and communication preferences. Protactile’s history cannot stand in for all of them. In their 2026 review, Deanna Gagne and DeafBlind educator Hayley Broadway argue that research should give immersed protactile users authority as collaborators in its questions, methods and interpretation. [S06]

The research connects changes in access to changes in linguistic form. [S02, S03] The question we take from this is who gets to define participation in a conversation. In this case, DeafBlind speakers changed those terms in ways that reached inside the expression. Even the listener’s place in producing a word was open to change.