D/deaf children of Deaf parents reportedly begin learning finger-spelling as young as thirteen months old, but deaf children born to hearing, nonsigning parents lack natural access to the native (spoken) language of their families, often exhibiting later language development. Forty-four deaf adults participated in a fingerspelling test of…

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…

This study investigated the impact of language modality and age of acquisition on semantic fluency in American Sign Language (ASL) and English. Experiment 1 compared semantic fluency performance (e.g., name as many animals as possible in 1 min) for deaf native and early ASL signers and hearing monolingual English speakers. The results showed…

When children interpret spoken language in real time, linguistic information drives rapid shifts in visual attention to objects in the visual world. This language-vision interaction can provide insights into children's developing efficiency in language comprehension. But how does language influence visual attention when the linguistic signal and…

The purpose of this study was to describe the use and perceived impact of situated learning activities in ASL-English interpreter education in the United States. A mixed methods approach consisting of two separate studies was employed for the investigation. The first study was a survey of teaching methods used by interpreter educators to discover…

Deaf education and American Sign Language emerged in Connecticut during the early 1800s as part of a reactionary social and political agenda that included church control of government and public schools, antifeminism, anti-Catholicism, and, the topic of the present article, White nationalism. Topics discussed include the racist views of early…

The visual-manual modality of sign languages renders them a unique test case for language acquisition and processing theories. In this commentary the authors describe evidence from signed languages, and ask whether it is consistent with Ambridge's proposal. The evidence includes recent research on collocations in American Sign Language that reveal…

With the increasing prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), clinicians and schools are receiving a larger number of assessment referrals for eligibility or diagnostic clarification of ASD in children who are deaf and hard of hearing (D/HH). Meeting this increasing demand is often difficult given not all assessment professionals seek…

Cognitive mechanisms for sign language lexical access are fairly unknown. This study investigated whether phonological similarity facilitates lexical retrieval in sign languages using measures from a new lexical database for American Sign Language. Additionally, it aimed to determine which similarity metric best fits the present data in order to…

Responding to an article by Grushkin (EJ1174123) on how deaf children best learn to read, published, along with the present article, in an "American Annals of the Deaf" special issue, the authors review American Sign Language gloss. Topics include how ASL gloss enables deaf children to learn to read in their own language and…

Forty-four elementary grade teachers of deaf and hard of hearing students were surveyed about how they taught writing and their beliefs about writing. Beliefs about writing included their self-efficacy to teach writing, attitude toward writing, and epistemological beliefs about writing. These teachers from fifteen different states in the United…

Forty-four elementary grade teachers of deaf and hard of hearing students were surveyed about how they taught writing and their beliefs about writing. Beliefs about writing included their self-efficacy to teach writing, attitude towards writing, and epistemological beliefs about writing. These teachers from 15 different states in the United States…

This article reports an exploratory study of teacher candidate perception of learning, using video recording in an American Sign Language (ASL) class. Video recording for practice and reflection is relevant to learning ASL, a visual language. One advantage of recording video for learning ASL with mobile devices instead of computers is the larger…

This article explores the experiences of Spanish-speaking Latinx university students in a sign language interpreting program who were enrolled in service-learning classes. In the service-learning classes, the students partnered with a community service agency for the deaf that provided intervention services to Spanish-speaking families with deaf…

In everyday communication, not only do speakers describe, but they also depict. When depicting, speakers can take on the role of other people and quote their speech or imitate their actions. In previous work, we developed a paradigm to elicit depictions in speakers. Here we apply this paradigm to signers to explore depiction in the manual…