Evidence suggests that content incorporated into science museum exhibits remains out of reach for many visitors who are deaf or hard of hearing and who communicate in sign language. The implementation research described in this article was conducted by TERC, Inc. at the Museum of Science (MoS), Boston. The purpose was to examine use of a mobile…

The purpose of the study was to uncover and describe psycholinguistic and sociocognitive factors facilitating effective reading by signing adults who are profoundly deaf and do not use hearing technology. The sample comprised four groups, each consisting of 15 adults, for a total of 60 participants. The four groups were "deaf…

Case studies of adult d/Deaf or Hard of Hearing Multilingual Learners (DMLs) are few, especially studies of DMLs who learn more than one sign language and read logographic and alphabetic scripts. To reduce this paucity, two descriptive case studies are presented. Written questionnaires, face-to-face interviews, and self-appraisals of language-use…

Findings are presented from a descriptive qualitative study of 10 adults who were deafblind who were interviewed about their social lives. Additional data were collected from a discussion board and e-mails from the study participants. Three findings emerged from the data: (a) Navigating adaptations was a significant part of socialization. (b) Gaps…

Purpose: This study focused on whether developmental communication disorders exist in American Sign Language (ASL) and how they might be characterized. ASL studies is an emerging field; educators and clinicians have minimal access to descriptions of communication disorders of the signed modality. Additionally, there are limited resources for…

Deafblind readers are heterogeneous in reading skill acquisition. This qualitative study uses in-depth interviews and protocol analyses and queries the three deafblind adult participants in describing their metacomprehension, metacognitive and metalinguistic strategies used when reading different types of text. Using retrospective analysis, the…

Responses of 162 deaf adults to an interview survey indicated findings including that sign language should be learned at an early age, before speech; that language should be acquired bilingually; and that American Sign Language and English signs should form the basis of the two languages. (Author)

The primary goal of this study was to examine the feasibility of using the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) with 50 culturally deaf adults. Modifications to the standard protocol included using a visual-spatial language (American Sign Language) rather than a spoken language (English), as well as coding and procedural variations from the…

Variation in the parts of ASL signs (i.e., phonological variation) has been explained largely by reference to the influence of the preceding and the following segments. This article examines three linguistic variables in ASL: the sign deaf; the location of a class of signs represented by the verb know; and signs produced with a 1 handshape. For…

There is limited information on how communication barriers impact on the health of deaf individuals. The present article describes the development of a standardized interview tool to collect health-related information from deaf adults via face-to-face interviews in American Sign Language (ASL). Questions were selected largely from existing…