Over the years, persistently low achievement levels have led scholars to question whether reading skill development is different for deaf readers. Research findings suggest that in order for deaf students to become proficient readers, they must master the same fundamental abilities that are well established for hearing learners, regardless of the…

Across a diverse range of languages, children proceed through similar stages in their production of causal language: their initial verbs lack internal causal structure, followed by a period during which they produce causative overgeneralizations, indicating knowledge of a productive causative rule. We asked in this study whether a child not…

Previous research by Dupoux et al. [Dupoux, E., Pallier, C., Sebastian, N., & Mehler, J. (1997). A destressing "deafness" in French? "Journal of Memory Language" 36, 406-421; Dupoux, E., Peperkamp, S., & Sebastian-Galles (2001). A robust method to study stress' deafness. "Journal of the Acoustical Society of America" 110, 1608-1618.] found that…

The working memory model for Ease of Language Understanding (ELU) predicts that processing differences between language modalities emerge when cognitive demands are explicit. This prediction was tested in three working memory experiments with participants who were Deaf Signers (DS), Hearing Signers (HS), or Hearing Nonsigners (HN). Easily nameable…

We introduce a new method of sign language subtitling aimed at young deaf children who have not acquired reading skills yet, and can communicate only via signs. The method is based on: 1) the recently developed concept of "semantroid[TM]" (an animated 3D avatar limited to head and hands); 2) the design, development, and psychophysical evaluation…

Discusses two experiments investigating non-antecedent suppression in American Sign Language (ASL). Findings indicate that spoken and signed languages use the same processing mechanisms in resolving co-reference relations. Results also indicate that within the probe recognition paradigm, the spatial indexing of ASL pronouns is similar to gender…

Evidence from a nine-month longitudinal study of deaf children's early attempts at learning to read provides the construct for an instructional model that stresses that even though the children may have, at the least, a meager expressive sign language vocabulary, they can be lead successfully through the holophrastic or one-word stage of reading…