Additional language (L2/Ln) research largely focuses on learners whose first languages are spoken and who are learning additional spoken languages. In the past few decades, sign languages have become increasingly popular for hearing students in schools. These students must not only learn the vocabulary and grammar of sign languages but also manage…

Studies have shown that iconicity can provide a benefit to non-signers during the learning of single signs, but other aspects of signed messages that might also be beneficial have received less attention. In particular, do other features of signed languages help support comprehension of a message during the process of language learning? The…

When learning spoken second language (L2), words overlapping in form and meaning with one's native language (L1) help break into the new language. When nonsigning speakers learn a sign language as L2, such overlaps are absent because of the modality differences (L1: speech, L2: sign). In such cases, nonsigning speakers might use iconic…

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…

In the past years, there has been a significant increase in the number of people learning sign languages. For hearing second language (L2) signers, acquiring a sign language involves acquiring a new language in a different modality. Exploring how L2 sign perception is accomplished and how newly learned categories are created is the aim of the…

Recent evidence suggests that deaf children with CIs exposed to nonnative sign language from hearing parents can attain age-appropriate vocabularies in both sign and spoken language. It remains to be explored whether deaf children with CIs who are exposed to early nonnative sign language, but only up to implantation, also benefit from this input…

Several studies have explored the use of iconic gestures to improve the learning of foreign vocabulary. In this quest, words for abstract concepts have been largely neglected, under the assumption that abstract concepts have poor or non-existent sensory-motor representations. Yet, the Conceptual Metaphor Theory suggests that they are grounded on…

In this article, we provide an overview of the last twenty years of research on Indigenous sign languages, deaf community sign languages, co-speech gesture, and multimodal communication in the Australian context. From a global perspective, research on sign languages and on the gestures that normally accompany speech has been used as the basis for…

This paper critically analyses the meaning and use of translanguaging as an inclusive pedagogical strategy in the context of a bilingual deaf education classroom where there are asymmetrical sensorial experiences of being deaf and being hearing, and different access to 'codified' (either speech or sign-language) resources. The pedagogical…

Successful face-to-face communication involves multiple channels, notably hand gestures in addition to speech for spoken language, and mouth patterns in addition to manual signs for sign language. In four experiments, we assess the extent to which comprehenders of British Sign Language (BSL) and English rely, respectively, on cues from the hands…

When learning a second spoken language, cognates, words overlapping in form and meaning with one's native language, help breaking into the language one wishes to acquire. But what happens when the to-be-acquired second language is a sign language? We tested whether hearing nonsigners rely on their gestural repertoire at first exposure to a sign…

Many human languages have complex grammatical machinery devoted to temporality, but very little is known about how this came about. This paper investigates how people convey temporal information when they cannot use any conventional languages they know. In a laboratory experiment, adult participants were asked to convey information about simple…

Symbolic competence, "the ability to actively manipulate and shape one's environment on multiple scales of time and space" (Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008, p. 667), offers researchers and educators the ability to understand how learners position themselves. This positioning involves a vying for semiotic resources as a means to question…

Previous research on reference tracking has revealed a tendency towards over-explicitness in second language (L2) learners. Only limited evidence exists that this trend extends to situations where the learner's first and second languages do not share a sensory-motor modality. Using a story-telling paradigm, this study examined how hearing novice…

In the present study we aimed to investigate phonological substitution errors made by hearing second language (M2L2) learners of American Sign Language (ASL) during a sentence translation task. Learners saw sentences in ASL that were signed by either a native signer or a M2L2 learner. Learners were to simply translate the sentence from ASL to…