In this dissertation, I examine how fingerspelled words and core signs in American Sign Language (ASL) reduce as they are repeated. This investigation is motivated by theories of language production that posit that reduction may be shaped not only by reducing articulatory effort, but also by accommodation to an interlocutor's understanding of the…

Research literature and community narratives both emphasize the importance of self-determination in the lives of deaf youth. This paper describes the development, initial validation, and potential applications of a translated measure of self-determination for deaf youth, the SDI:SR ASL Translation (SDI:SR ASL). A sample of 3,309 young people who…

Across languages, children map words to meaning with great efficiency, despite a seemingly unconstrained space of potential mappings. The literature on how children do this is primarily limited to spoken language. This leaves a gap in our understanding of sign language acquisition, because several of the hypothesized mechanisms that children use…

Studies have shown that iconicity can provide a benefit to non-signers during the learning of single signs, but other aspects of signed messages that might also be beneficial have received less attention. In particular, do other features of signed languages help support comprehension of a message during the process of language learning? The…

The primary goal of this study was to explore how educational interpreter supervisors defined, experienced and approached their work in K-12 schools in the United States of America. A secondary goal was to examine how they interpreted, navigated and enacted educational and interpreting policy in their jobs as supervisors. A comparative case study…

Experience with a visual-spatial language may influence certain cognitive processes (Keehner and Gathercole 2007). Spatial ability is an important cognitive skill (Linn and Petersen 1985). Some research has found that deaf signers outperform hearing nonsigners on certain spatial tasks (e.g., Emmorey, Kosslyn, and Bellugi 1993) and that hearing…

Infants are born highly sensitive to the natural patterns found in languages. They use their perceptual sensitivity to acquire detailed information about the structure of languages in their environment. To date, most studies of infant perception and early language acquisition have investigated spoken/auditory languages and hearing infants (e.g.…

Recent research has shown that a distinct variety of American Sign Language, known as Black ASL, developed in the segregated schools for deaf African Americans in the US South during the pre-civil rights era. Research has also shown that in some respects Black ASL is closer than most white varieties to the standard taught in ASL classes and found…

In 1964, Deaf and hearing stakeholders convened at Ball State Teachers College in Muncie, Indiana, to discuss the state of signed language interpreting in the United States. One topic of discussion was the competencies these interpreters should exhibit. Four decades later, Witter-Merithew and Johnson (2005) described American Sign Language…

Families with deaf parents and hearing children often demonstrate bimodal bilingualism, using both a signed and a spoken language. This study uses an audience design framework to analyze the home language use of two bimodal bilingual families in the United States. The school-age children in these families appeared to design their utterances for…