Limited access to spoken and signed language is a worldwide phenomenon affecting deaf children. Language delay caused by impeded language acquisition has negative cascading effects on deaf children's learning and development. In the event of stymied language development, deaf students exhibit highly errored writing and commit errors unseen in the…

This qualitative study delves into the innovative Bilingual Grammar Curriculum. The curriculum aims to enhance bilingualism and linguistic skills among deaf students by integrating American Sign Language instruction and written language grammatical structures. The researcher conducted in-depth interviews with 12 experienced educators of the deaf…

This review addresses the question of how early access to sign language influences the development of deaf children with cochlear implants (CIs) by examining the literature surrounding the topic across the domains of spoken/written language development, cognitive development, and sociocultural development. Although research in the realm of…

While it is common for deaf children to be bilingual in a spoken and signed language, studies often attribute any delays in language acquisition to language deprivation, rather than as a result of cross-linguistic interaction. This study compares the production of simple sentences in three languages (Palestinian Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, and…

While current debates oppose the cochlear implant's privileging of speech acquisition to teaching sign language, nineteenth-century debates, in contrast, opposed those who saw sign language as a tool for learning to read and write, and those who saw in it an autonomous language for organizing thought itself. Should the order of gestural signs…

"The Oxford Handbook of Deaf Studies in Literacy" brings together state-of-the-art research on literacy learning among deaf and hard of hearing learners (DHH). With contributions from experts in the field, this volume covers topics such as the importance of language and cognition, phonological or orthographic awareness, morphosyntactic…

In recent years, the intersection of cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and neuroscience with regard to deaf individuals has received increasing attention from a variety of academic and educational audiences. Both research and pedagogy have addressed questions about whether deaf children learn in the same ways that hearing children…

This dissertation study seeks to understand how teachers who work in an ASL/English bilingual educational program for preschool children conceptualize and utilize phonological instruction of American Sign Language (ASL). While instruction that promotes phonological awareness of spoken English is thought to provide educational benefits to young…

Without written forms, signed languages do not permit the type of textual record available to speakers of English and other written languages. Deaf signers have generally relied on the language of the dominant hearing culture for this purpose. Because of their visual-gestural modality, signed languages present a unique set of challenges for…

Researchers, the Deaf community, teachers of deaf children and speech and language therapists all share a concern about how to improve deaf children's written language skills. One part of literacy is story writing or narrative. A finding from a small number of studies is that children exposed to sign language from early childhood onwards achieve…

A project in Sweden focuses on the early linguistic development of preschool deaf children in families where the parents are also deaf. The School for the Deaf in Sweden is involved with describing the Swedish language as it appears to a deaf learner, a description to be used as a basis for teacher training and inservice in the teaching of the…

Describes a preschool class for deaf children co-taught by two teachers (one hearing, one deaf) that uses a whole language approach to build students' American Sign Language (ASL) and written English skills. The class uses a thematic approach to organize learning activities through the creative use of ASL. (DB)

This report summarizes two studies which documented the development of prelingually deaf children (N=4, N=40) in Sweden exposed to sign communication during preschool years. The first study involved analysis of video recordings, forming a qualitative description of social strategies used by four children with different social positions in the peer…

This study focuses on the language and literacy worlds of three profoundly deaf preschool children, whose lack of a strong spoken English base provided an opportunity to explore the relationship between spoken language development and written language development and to investigate young children's written language development in light of the…

Reports on the continuing work in the development of a computerized writing system for American Sign Language (ASL) called Signfont. Inventories for handshapes and nonmanual markers are presented and discussed extensively. A proposed inventory of phonetic handshapes in ASL are appended. (Author/LMO)