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…

The communication gap between deaf and non-deaf communities arises due to the use of distinct mother languages. A deaf student, who used to communicate in sign language, cannot read fluently materials written in spoken language. This fact causes serious difficulties to deaf students since most didactic materials in higher education are available…

In 2002, the Brazilian deaf communities' struggles against academic failure and deaf student dropout won a linguistic policy: the LIBRAS Federal Law. This official law, regulated by Decree N.5626 in 2005, recognises LIBRAS as a national language and requires inclusive educational practices in a bilingual model in order to promote meaningful…

This study explores relationships between Taiwanese Sign Language (TSL) and Chinese reading comprehension with 65 deaf adults/youth (study 1: ages 14--50 years) and 27 deaf children (study 2: ages 6--13 years). Significant relationships were found between scores on two tests measuring TSL tasks. In study #1, the TSL tasks (measured by Taiwan Sign…

Picturebooks are powerful educational tools, both for their content and their contributions to the literacy development of children. In New Zealand bilingual picturebooks featuring Te Reo Maori and New Zealand English have increased in number since the 1980s when Te Reo Maori gained official status and revitalisation efforts burgeoned. More…

Acquisition of natural language has been shown to fundamentally impact both one's ability to use the first language and the ability to learn subsequent languages later in life. Sign languages offer a unique perspective on this issue because Deaf signers receive access to signed input at varying ages. The majority acquires sign language in (early)…

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…

As a consequence of long-lasting experiences of communicative and social deprivation and exclusion, adults who are deaf and have intellectual disabilities must be considered a high-risk group for the development of mental health problems. A therapeutic living community model with special emphasis on social communication development that has been…

Studies examining visuospatial working memory (WM) in individuals with congenital deafness have yielded inconsistent results, and tactile WM has rarely been examined. The current study examined WM span tasks in the two modalities among 20 individuals with congenital deafness and 20 participants with typical hearing. The congenital deafness group…

This study investigated the effects of visual and kinaesthetic instructional cues separately and in combination on the learning of motor skills by individuals with deafness. In addition, whether the mastery level of sign language would affect motor skill learning was also investigated. The task was dart throwing. The sample consisted of 69…

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…

This paper discusses issues of language revitalization and linguistic prescriptivism related to the teaching of American Sign Language (ASL) in Canada. I describe the current and historical context for ASL teaching, including the increase in ASL course offerings at some postsecondary institutions, and discuss findings related to challenges in…

This article describes the project of producing Polish Sign Language (PJM) translations of a series of Polish primary-school textbooks. We discuss the multimedia software application that presents the resulting bilingual textbooks, which allows video clips to be played back by clicking on the corresponding original Polish text. We also explain the…

Through detailed multimodal analyses, this article shows how participants of an English language course create and manage sites of attention for achieving collaboration across multiple spaces. The ethnographic data for the study comes from an English language course 'Academic reading' offered for university students majoring in Finnish Sign…

Purpose: The use of sign-supported speech (SSS) in the education of deaf students has been recently discussed in relation to its usefulness with deaf children using cochlear implants. To clarify the benefits of SSS for comprehension, 2 eye-tracking experiments aimed to detect the extent to which signs are actively processed in this mode of…