This article discusses the function of a particular feature of sign language--mouth action--as it is expressed in various discourse contexts. Specifically, we examine forms of mouthing and mouth gesture as they are used in signed narrative and expository texts, highlighting the signers' choices during the production of these two text types. We…

Background: Staff may encourage individuals with intellectual disabilities to use manual signs by modelling its use, but implementing key word signing during daily activities can be demanding. Method: Staff's use of manual signs was observed in four special schools and four day centres for adults with intellectual disabilities during communicative…

Recent evidence demonstrates that pictures corresponding to iconic signs are named faster than pictures corresponding to non-iconic signs. The present study investigates the locus of the iconicity advantage in hearing bimodal bilinguals. A naming experiment with iconic and non-iconic pictures in Italian Sign Language (LIS) was conducted. Bimodal…

This study compared the lexical-semantic organization skills of bilingually developing deaf children in American Sign Language (ASL) and English with those of a monolingual hearing group. A repeated meaning-association paradigm was used to assess retrieval of semantic relations in deaf 6-10-year-olds exposed to ASL from birth by their deaf…

Background: Deafness has an adverse impact on children's ability to acquire spoken languages. Signed languages offer a more accessible input for deaf children, but because the vast majority are born to hearing parents who do not sign, their early exposure to sign language is limited. Deaf children as a whole are therefore at high risk of language…

We adapted the semantic fluency task into British Sign Language (BSL). In Study 1, we present data from twenty-two deaf signers aged four to fifteen. We show that the same "cognitive signatures" that characterize this task in spoken languages are also present in deaf children, for example, the semantic clustering of responses. In Study…

Language acquisition involves learning not only grammatical rules and a lexicon but also what people are intending to convey with their utterances: the semantic/pragmatic component of language. In this article we separate the contributions of linguistic development and cognitive maturity to the acquisition of the semantic/pragmatic component of…

Bilinguals who are fluent in American Sign Language (ASL) and English often produce "code-blends"--simultaneously articulating a sign and a word while conversing with other ASL-English bilinguals. To investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying code-blend processing, we compared picture-naming times (Experiment 1) and semantic categorization…

The aim of this research was to test whether there is an inherent difficulty in understanding prohibition signs rather than obligation signs. In the experiment conducted, participants decided whether simple car movements presented on a computer screen were allowed or not according to either obligation or prohibition traffic signs. The information…

Learning to read is a major obstacle for children who are deaf. The otherwise significant role of phonology is often limited as a result of hearing loss. However, semantic knowledge may facilitate reading comprehension. One important aspect of semantic knowledge concerns semantic categorization. In the present study, the quality of the semantic…

This study sought to test the most efficient representation mode with which children with hearing impairment could express a story while producing connectives indicating relations of time and of cause and effect. Using Bruner's (1973, 1986, 1990) representation stages, we tested the comparative effectiveness of Virtual Reality (VR) as a mode of…

Chafe's theory of generative semantics, which uses spoken language for illustration, can be applied to American Sign Language in two ways: to combat the erroneous assumption that sign languages simply represent spoken language in visible form and to explain various parts of the grammar of American Sign Language. (MSE)

Because the relationship of gesticulation to sign language has not received much research attention, this study considers gesture and sign among users of signed and oral languages. Results suggest that gestures produced by deaf individuals can be distinguished from the sign language in which they are embedded, including their semantic and…

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)

This report is a cross-linguistic study that compares the sequence of emergence of semantic relations in English with the sequence of emergence of these relations in the acquisition of American Sign Language. American Sign Language (ASL) differs from English in modality (it is a visual-gesture language rather than an auditory-vocal one) and in the…