Limited access to spoken and signed language is a worldwide phenomenon affecting deaf children. Language delay caused by impeded language acquisition has negative cascading effects on deaf children's learning and development. In the event of stymied language development, deaf students exhibit highly errored writing and commit errors unseen in the…

This study investigated through an online survey how sign language practitioners changed their sign language assessment practices during the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey consisted of five sections and 29 questions overall. It was provided in written English and German as well as in International Sign and was administered online between October…

The focus of this article is on deafblind people who are or have been involved with deaf signing communities and, when vision changes, transition to tactile reception of sign language. This brings about a disconnection with the signing community, exploration of (other) possibilities, and seeking or creating deaf blind spaces. In the United States,…

Attitudes to sign languages or language policies are often not overtly discussed or recorded but they influence deaf young people's educational opportunities and outcomes. Two qualitative studies from Scotland investigate the provision of British Sign Language as accommodation in public examinations. The first explores the views of deaf pupils and…

Nonmanual articulations in sign languages range from being semantically impoverished to semantically rich, and from being independent of manual articulations to coordinated with them. But, while this range has been well noted, certain nonmanuals remain understudied. Of particular interest to us are nonmanual articulations coordinated with manual…

This study examined the corrective feedback Deaf teachers used to target handshape, movement, and place-of-articulation errors in introductory American Sign Language (ASL) classes for hearing students. Although feedback is underresearched in bimodal second language (M2-L2) pedagogy, there is some evidence that teacher practices may differ from…

The quality of sign language interpreting (SLI) is a gripping construct among practitioners, educators and researchers, calling for reliable and valid assessment. There has been a diverse array of methods in the extant literature to measure SLI quality, ranging from traditional error analysis to recent rubric scoring. In this study, we want to…

In this article two dimensions of handshape complexity are analyzed as potential building blocks of phonological contrast-joint complexity and finger group complexity. We ask whether sign language patterns are elaborations of those seen in the gestures produced by hearing people without speech (pantomime) or a more radical reorganization of them.…

It is common practice for K-12 schools to assess multilingual students' language proficiency to determine language support program placement. Because such programs can provide essential scaffolding, the policies guiding these assessments merit careful consideration. It is well accepted that quality assessments must be valid (representative of the…

This article addresses the special challenges associated with collecting longitudinal samples of the spontaneous sign language and spoken language production by young bimodal bilingual children. We discuss the methods used in our study of children in the United States and Brazil. Since one of our goals is to observe both sign language and speech,…

Several scholars have asked what are the relations between two recently developed concepts, Deaf ethnicity and Deafhood. The emergence of these concepts, along with others such as "audism" (Humphries 1977), "dysconscious audism," "Sign Language Peoples," and "Deaf Gain" reflects important attempts by Deaf…

As the field of education of the d/Deaf and hard of hearing (d/Dhh) continues to diversify, postsecondary institutions must pay close attention not only to the changing needs of d/Dhh students but to the practitioners they are preparing to serve this population. Students who are d/Dhh and come from homes where a language other than English or…

Researchers have used various theories to explain deaf individuals' reading skills, including the dual route reading theory, the orthographic depth theory, and the early language access theory. This study tested 4 groups of children--hearing with dyslexia, hearing without dyslexia, deaf early signers, and deaf late signers (N = 857)--from 4…

Martha's Vineyard--an island off the East Coast of the United States--is known as a community where "everyone signed" for several hundred years, a utopia in the eyes of many Deaf people. Currently, there exist around the world a number of small similar "shared signing communities," for example, in Mexico, Bali, Israel, and…

Examinations of the etymology of American Sign Language have typically involved superficial analyses of signs as they exist over a short period of time. While it is widely known that ASL is related to French Sign Language, there has yet to be a comprehensive study of this historic relationship between their lexicons. This article presents…