During the summer of 2022, Ashley Greene, a professor at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, and a co-author of this article, began a discussion on American Sign Language (ASL) literature with her doctoral students. The students, most of whom had backgrounds in K-12 deaf education or ASL education, explored what ASL literature means, how such…

The present study used an observational learning framework to investigate changes in non-native signing deaf children's narrative renditions before (Time 1) and after (Time 2) a single viewing of a signing adult's rendition of the same story. The deaf adult model rendered the picture book "Goodnight Gorilla" in American Sign Language…

This paper examines recent lexical expansion in New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) in the context of change in the status of the language and ongoing contact with other (spoken and signed) languages. We categorised 917 new signs documented in the past five years according to their source, semantic field, and sign formation mechanism(s), both…

Teachers of the d/Deaf (TODs) struggle to select appropriate storybooks for elementary-aged Deaf pre-readers who use American Sign Language (Hayes & Shaw, 1994). Hayes and Shaw (1994) created a book selection system for TODs, but their methodology was difficult to evaluate. The purpose of the present research was to create an empirically…

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…

For d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing prereaders who communicate predominately in spoken and/or signed English (DHH-English), Teachers of the d/Deaf (TODs) read books aloud to increase English skills, auditory-verbal comprehension, sequencing skills, verbal reasoning, background knowledge, and sight word recognition. Teachers struggle to select…

In this paper, we compare responses of deaf signers and hearing non-signers engaged in a categorization task of signs and non-linguistic human actions. We examine the time it takes to make such categorizations under conditions of 180 degrees stimulus inversion and as a function of repetition priming, in an effort to understand whether the…

This article discusses the role of eye gaze in creative sign language. Because eye gaze conveys various types of linguistic and poetic information, it is an intrinsic part of sign language linguistics in general and of creative signing in particular. We discuss various functions of eye gaze in poetic signing and propose a classification of gaze…

Two experiments investigated Chinese deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) adolescents' recognition of category names in an innovative task of semantic categorization. In each trial, the category-name target appeared briefly at the screen center followed by two words or two pictures for two basic-level exemplars of high or middle typicality, which…

Handshape works differently in nouns versus a class of verbs in American Sign Language (ASL) and thus can serve as a cue to distinguish between these two word classes. Handshapes representing characteristics of the object itself ("object" handshapes) and handshapes representing how the object is handled ("handling" handshapes)…

The efficacy of video-based sign language (SL) navigation aids to improve Web search for Deaf Signers was tested by two experiments. Experiment 1 compared 2 navigation aids based on text hyperlinks linked to embedded SL videos, which differed in the spatial contiguity between the text hyperlink and SL video (contiguous vs. distant). Deaf Signers'…

The Gallaudet Research Institute confirms a 22.5 per cent increase from 2.7 per cent (2000) to 25.2 per cent (2011) in deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students whose parents use a language "other" than English or American sign language (ASL) at home. These DHH students who are also English language learners (ELLs) struggle to learn English, perhaps…

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…

"Highly iconic" structures in Sign Language enable a narrator to act, switch characters, describe objects, or report actions in four-dimensions. This group of linguistic structures has no real spoken-language equivalent. Topographical descriptions are also achieved in a sign-language specific manner via the use of signing-space and…

This article sheds light on issues concerning discrimination in the history of deaf people in Sweden in the 20th century. With the help of a specific typology of concepts for analysing discrimination exercised through the use of language, it is shown how the categorization of the hearing impaired has changed over time and how, in this process of…