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…

Successful face-to-face communication involves multiple channels, notably hand gestures in addition to speech for spoken language, and mouth patterns in addition to manual signs for sign language. In four experiments, we assess the extent to which comprehenders of British Sign Language (BSL) and English rely, respectively, on cues from the hands…

Students acquiring American Sign Language (ASL) as a second language (L2) struggle with fingerspelling comprehension more than skilled signers. These L2 learners might be attempting to perceive and comprehend fingerspelling in a way that is different from native signers, which could negatively impact their ability to comprehend fingerspelling.…

Findings are presented from the first randomized control trial of the effects of encouraging symbolic gesture (or "baby sign") on infant language, following 40 infants from age 8 months to 20 months. Half of the mothers were trained to model a target set of gestures to their infants. Frequent measures were taken of infant language…

This study investigated differences in the phonological knowledge and reading skill of deaf adults using three experimental conditions that tested sensitivity to syllables, rhyme, and phonemes. Analysis of response latencies and accuracy in the three awareness tasks demonstrated that skilled deaf readers had superior phonological awareness skill…

Three studies are presented in this paper that address how nonsigners perceive the visual prosodic cues in a sign language. In Study 1, adult American nonsigners and users of American Sign Language (ASL) were compared on their sensitivity to the visual cues in ASL Intonational Phrases. In Study 2, hearing, nonsigning American infants were tested…

This study takes advantage of a novel methodology--the use of a single culturally-meaningful text written in English and presented to different audiences in ASL--to examine the ways in which Deaf native signers utilize contextualization strategies in order to match the perceived linguistic and informational needs of an audience. We demonstrate,…

This study aimed to explore the recognition of emotional and non-emotional biological movements in children with severe and profound deafness. Twenty-four deaf children, together with 24 control children matched on mental age and 24 control children matched on chronological age, were asked to identify a person's actions, subjective states,…

This study compared the total amount of training time and total number of trial blocks for individuals with severe developmental disabilities to acquire mands under control of unconditioned establishing operations and mands under control of transitive conditioned establishing operations for manual sign and for the Picture Exchange Communication…

Purpose: This study compared the influence of speaker-implemented iconic hand gestures and alphabet cues on speech intelligibility scores and strategy helpfulness ratings for 3 adults with cerebral palsy and dysarthria who differed from one another in their overall motor abilities. Method: A total of 144 listeners (48 per speaker) orthographically…