Factors influencing native and nonnative signers' syntactic judgment ability in American Sign Language (ASL) were explored for 421 deaf students aged 7;6-18;5. Predictors for syntactic knowledge were chronological age, age of entering a school for the deaf, gender, and additional learning disabilities. Mixed-effects linear modeling analysis…

Self-assessment is an emerging topic in ASL/English interpreter education that is being recognized as critical for students completing the degree-to-certification process and needs to be thoroughly explored. Using Scaffolding Theory and self-assessment drawn from Self-Directed Learning Theory, this exploratory, qualitative interview study…

When spoken language (unimodal) bilinguals switch between languages, they must simultaneously inhibit 1 language and activate the other language. Because American Sign Language (ASL)-English (bimodal) bilinguals can switch into and out of code-blends (simultaneous production of a sign and a word), we can tease apart the cost of inhibition (turning…

Pre-school education is significant in the education of deaf children. The pre-school teacher is a gateway to realising the inclusion of deaf children in schools. In this study we investigated prospective pre-school teachers' opinions and thoughts about sign language in deaf children's education. In this descriptive study we employed the…

Most FLP research focuses on intrafamily communication (1FLP) and how this is impacted by larger contexts. But what happens when different multilingual families interact intensively on a daily basis? This article analyses language use during a holiday in India in and between four deaf-hearing befriended families, and how this evolved over the…

Cosmopolitanism theory was mostly developed separately from the study of multilingualism: while language is central to cosmopolitanism as a practice, only a few scholars focusing on cosmopolitanism have taken a language-centred approach. We further theorise the relationship between cosmopolitanism and translingual practice with our focus on…

D/deaf children of Deaf parents reportedly begin learning finger-spelling as young as thirteen months old, but deaf children born to hearing, nonsigning parents lack natural access to the native (spoken) language of their families, often exhibiting later language development. Forty-four deaf adults participated in a fingerspelling test of…

In 1964, Deaf and hearing stakeholders convened at Ball State Teachers College in Muncie, Indiana, to discuss the state of signed language interpreting in the United States. One topic of discussion was the competencies these interpreters should exhibit. Four decades later, Witter-Merithew and Johnson (2005) described American Sign Language…

The realisation of the linguistic rights of Deaf individuals is, to a considerable extent, dependent upon whether there are majority language speakers who acquire a sign language as an L2 and use their L2 skills. Still, the motivation of hearing persons in learning sign languages as L2s is a largely unmapped area. This study seeks to capture the…

This article reports an exploratory study of teacher candidate perception of learning, using video recording in an American Sign Language (ASL) class. Video recording for practice and reflection is relevant to learning ASL, a visual language. One advantage of recording video for learning ASL with mobile devices instead of computers is the larger…

This study examined the corrective feedback Deaf teachers used to target handshape, movement, and place-of-articulation errors in introductory American Sign Language (ASL) classes for hearing students. Although feedback is underresearched in bimodal second language (M2-L2) pedagogy, there is some evidence that teacher practices may differ from…

The current study investigated the mechanism of language switching in unbalanced visual unimodal bilinguals as well as balanced and unbalanced bimodal bilinguals during a picture naming task. All three groups exhibited significant switch costs across two languages, with symmetrical switch cost in balanced bimodal bilinguals and asymmetrical switch…

This article follows the often difficult educational path of deaf children in Tanzania, from homes with very little communication to cherished times at deaf (units of) primary schools, through secondary school, which had to be "endured" only, up to work life. It describes challenges and coping strategies, many of which are connected to…

We present a study in which multimedia alphabet books were constructed for ten languages using the Learning And Reading Assistant (LARA) platform. We describe the alphabet books we built, the different design features they instantiate, and an initial evaluation using an anonymous online questionnaire. Links are provided to the books themselves,…

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…