Support for baby signing (BS) with hearing infants tends to converge toward three camps or positions. Those who advocate BS to advance infant language, literacy, behavioral, and cognitive development rely heavily on anecdotal evidence and social media to support their claims. Those who advocate BS as an introduction to another language, such as…

Presents study designed to determine whether interruption in the use of the manual encoding modality would retard learning in prelingually deaf subjects. One group of students used finger spelling and finger numeration in learning eight pairs of number-word combinations while the other group used no manual encoding. Results show groups using…

mparison of sign language used by Urubu-Kaapor Indians in the Amazonian jungle (UKSL) and sign language used by deaf people in Sao Paulo (SPSL). In the former situation, deaf people are more integrated and accepted into their community than in Sao Paulo, because most hearing individuals are able and willing to use sign language to communicate with…

Attempts to prove that users of American Sign Language (ASL) do perform within a closed system of manual and nonmanual sign production features (phonemes and distinctive features). Deaf signers are quite capable of creating nonsense words as well as communicating with signers of other languages through pantomime and other paralinguistic features.…

Study indicates that hearing impaired residential students are more proficient users of American Sign Language than are hearing impaired children enrolled in local, public school programs, and older such residential students are more proficient in the language than are younger students. (SL)

A review of "Sign Languages Used by Deaf People, and Psycholinguistics: A Critical Evaluation" (A. Van Uden, 1986), a book "denying that ...there is any such thing as a sign language," points out that a sign language's perceived lack of phonological and morphological rules is a more social than linguistic problem. (CB)

Describes a study that found, contrary to previous reports, that a strong, symmetrical release from proactive interference (PI) is the normal outcome for switches between American Sign Language (ASL) signs and English words and with switches between Manual and English alphabet characters. Subjects were college students enrolled in their first ASL…