Research suggests that English-language proficiency is critical if students who are deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH) are to read as their hearing peers. One explanation for the traditionally reported reading achievement plateau when students are D/HH is the inability to hear insalient English morphology. Signing Exact English can provide visual…

Over the past 30-years linguists have been witnessing the birth and evolution of a language, Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua (ISN), in Nicaragua, and have initiated and documented the syntax and grammar of this new language. Research is only beginning to emerge on the implications of ISN on the education of deaf/hard of hearing children in Nicaragua.…

This dissertation contains three studies that investigate whether attested patterns of constituent order distribution and change in the world's languages can be attributed, in part, to cognitive preferences for some constituent orders over others. To assess these preferences, seven experiments employed an "elicited pantomime" task.…

New positive attitudes towards language interaction in the realm of bilingualism open new horizons for sign bilingual education. Plaza-Pust and Morales-Lopez have innovatively reconceptualised a new cross-disciplinary approach to sign bilingualism, based on both sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics. According to this framework, cross-modal…

A sample of elementary school-and high school-age deaf students in special education programs in the Australian state of Queensland using Australasian Signed English (ASE) took the Test of Syntactic Abilities (Quigley, Steinkamp, Power, & Jones, 1978) and wrote a story in response to a wordless picture sequence. Several analyses of the…

A total of 79 profoundly deaf 8- to 12-year-old children were tested for comprehension of spoken, written, and signed (Paget-Gorman Sign System, PGSS) English grammatical contrasts. It is concluded that the PGSS provides a communication channel that does not hinder language acquisition, but does not overcome the grammatical problems of deaf…

Examines whether manually coded English (MCE) sign language systems are learnable. Reading achievement and expressive English skills of deaf students educated using only a MCE sign system were examined. Deaf students had expressive English skills comparable to hearing students in respect to syntactical and lexical skills but were deficient in…

Details the influence of English on British Sign Language (BSL) at the syntactic, morphological, lexical, idiomatic, and phonological levels. Shows how BSL uses loan translations, fingerspellings, and the use of mouth patterns derived from English language spoken words to include elements from English. (Author/VWL)

Examines from a creolist perspective the claim that American Sign Language (ASL) has creole origins. Applying criteria based on the work of various creole researchers, the article concludes that the evidence for creole origins of ASL does not meet any usual definition of a creole. The article discusses lexical and morhosyntactic similarities…

This digest uses a question-and-answer format to summarize basic information about the use of English-based sign systems with children who are deaf or hard of hearing. English-based sign systems are explained as using the vocabulary of American Sign Language (ASL) with the grammatical and syntactical features of English. These systems include…

The research resumes presented here comprise the responses received by the Stanford Child Language Project to a general request for reports on research in progress. These reports include all those distributed at the Child Language Research Forum in March 1972 and a small number received later. The resumes cover a wide range of topics and present,…

The research resumes presented here comprise the responses received by the Stanford Child Language Project to a general request for reports on research in progress. These reports include all those distributed at the Child Language Research Forum in April 1973. The resumes cover a wide range of topics and present, in order, the following…