The distinction between natural sign languages and sign-supported speech is a controversial topic and difficult to assess purely on structural terms because of language contact. Here, we consider British Sign Language (BSL) and Sign Supported English (SSE) with reference to Irvine and Gal's (2000. Language ideology and linguistic differentiation.…

Research has demonstrated that deaf children of deaf signing parents (DOD) are afforded developmental advantages. This can be misconstrued as indicating that no DOD children exhibit early language delays (ELDs) because of their early access to a visual language. Little research has studied this presumption. In this study, we examine 174 ratings of…

The first step in engaging deaf and hard of hearing children in language-rich environments is getting their attention. Hearing teachers intuitively raise their voices as they enter their classes to get students' attention; Deaf teachers intuitively wait for the students to look at them. Deaf sign language teachers report that when hearing students…

Face masks occlude parts of the face which hinders social communication and emotion recognition. Since sign language users are known to process facial information not only perceptually but also linguistically, examining face processing in deaf signers may reveal how linguistic aspects add to perceptual information. In general, signers could be…

The lack of diversity in the language sciences has increasingly been criticized as it holds the potential for producing flawed theories. Research on (i) geographically diverse language communities and (ii) on sign languages is necessary to corroborate, sharpen, and extend existing theories. This study contributes a case study of adapting a…

This longitudinal pilot study examined the pointing behavior of two Israeli Deaf mothers and one hearing mother over the course of their infant's signed/spoken language acquisition. Three aspects were analyzed: (a) frequency of use; (b) function; and (c) pointing form. The findings indicated that the Deaf mothers used pointing more frequently than…

This article analyzes the construction of sign names in an emerging sign language from Mexico, the Yucatec Maya Sign Language (YMSL). Data comes from elicited interviews as well as natural interactions collected by the authors and signers from two different villages, Chicán and Nohkop. Despite YMSL being an isolate language, sign name construction…

Research on the acquisition of American Sign Language (ASL) by deaf autistic children has documented similarities to the linguistic profile of hearing children on the autism spectrum and has identified sign-specific phenomena that could serve as clinical markers of autism in the deaf population. However, the acquisition of a signed language by…

Minimal expressions are at the heart of interaction: Interjections like "Huh?" and "Mhm" keep conversations flowing by establishing and reinforcing intersubjectivity among interlocutors. Crosslinguistic research has identified that similar interactional pressures can yield structurally similar words (e.g., to initiate repair…

Researchers examining the structure of questions in signed languages, often using elicited data from informants, have proposed that there are specific manual and nonmanual actions produced by signers to indicate different question types (e.g., Zeshan 2004), for example, raised eyebrows for polar questions. In the current study, we add to this body…

The following article looks into the question of negative affixation in Polish Sign Language. Until today only one negative prefix and one negative suffix were recognized in Polish Sign Language. Our research investigates farther these two affixes looking into their etymologies, constraints and new examples of their use. The negative prefix…

Human languages, signed and spoken, can be characterized by the structural patterns they use to associate communicative "forms" with "meanings." One such pattern is paradigmatic morphology, where complex words are built from the systematic use "and re-use" of sub-lexical units. Here, we provide evidence of emergent…

Deaf-sighted, deaf-blind, and hearing-sighted people have been interacting within a small community in the Bay Islands of Honduras for over a century (Ali 2023; Ali and Braithwaite 2020). In this article, we sketch the history of the community and the ways in which signers make use of their own and their interlocutor's bodies to co-construct…

Little is known about how hearing adults learn sign languages. Our objective in this study was to investigate how learners of British Sign Language (BSL) produce narratives, and we focused in particular on viewpoint-taking. Twenty-three intermediate-level learners of BSL and 10 deaf native/early signers produced a narrative in BSL using the…

We investigated relations between kindergarten precursors and second-grade reading skills in deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children, and aimed to identify subgroups based on reading skills, in order to explore early signs of later reading delays. DHH children (n = 23, M[subscript age] kindergarten = 6.25) participated from kindergarten-second…