In recent years, normed signed language assessments have become a useful tool for researchers, practitioners, and advocates. Nevertheless, there are limitations in their application, particularly for the diagnosis of language disorders, and learning disabilities. Here, we discuss some of the available normed, signed language assessments and some…

The goal of this paper is to compare the different anaphoric strategies that Catalan and Catalan Sign Language (LSC) use by means of a parallel corpus. In particular, our comparison is focused in an examination of the uses of overt subject pronouns in Catalan and how these uses are rendered in a language that exploits the visual-manual modality,…

The emphasis on potentiality needs to be understood in relation to the evolution of deaf education and the place of sign language in deaf education. We can look upon this evolution from a rational perspective. However, this can only be understood and adequately addressed while also taking into account the emotional chord that is struck in deaf…

This paper attends to languaging in the context of visually oriented communities of sign language users through the concept of "chaining." I define chaining as the patterned, routine ways of interlinking different linguistic and multimodal elements. The goal of this paper is to discuss the concepts of chaining, languaging and…

I remember asking my mother at different points in my life why I could read better--generally handle English better--than my friends. Mama would always consider the unusual depth and speed of my language and literacy development and respond with a variation of the following: "I refused to accept what the doctors were telling me. I refused to…

This article is the story of how Traci Penland, the mother of three children, two of whom are deaf, stopped thinking of "the school"--the combined presence of teachers, professionals, support staff, deaf education specialists, audiologists, and administrators--as her enemy in her pursuit to help her daughter in her educational journey. A…

Sign languages present particular challenges to language assessors in relation to variation in signs, weakly defined citation forms, and a general lack of standard-setting work even in long-established measures of productive sign proficiency. The present article addresses and explores these issues via a mixed-methods study of a human-rated…

This article examines the diversity of sign language varieties used in Lima, Peru. The majority of the analysis is based on lexicostatistics, using data collected in 2014 to compare nine signers and to determine foreign influences. This technique is used to better understand the linguistic situation without the need for a large corpus of data. Two…

Little is known about the nature of fingerspelling during sign language interpretation. In this small-scale, exploratory study, we examined the fingerspelling of interpreters working in five different sign languages: American Sign Language (ASL), Australian Sign Language (Auslan), British Sign Language (BSL), Irish Sign Language (ISL), and Italian…

The article discusses the importance of sociohistorical context which is the foundation of variation studies in sociolinguistics. The studies on variation in spoken and signed languages are reviewed with the discussion of geographical and social aspects which are treated as external factors in the formation and maintenance of dialects and those…

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…

While it is common for deaf children to be bilingual in a spoken and signed language, studies often attribute any delays in language acquisition to language deprivation, rather than as a result of cross-linguistic interaction. This study compares the production of simple sentences in three languages (Palestinian Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, and…

The article poses questions about which (meta)linguistic discourses and processes take place among Deaf queers in Berlin, Germany: Which topics and reflection processes they deal with?; Which expressions, self-designations, and foreign appellations in sign language do Deaf queers consider as acceptable or as discriminatory?; How can the Deaf-queer…

This study investigates practices around the bestowal of personal sign names to adult New Zealand Sign Language learners, from both teachers' and students' perspectives. Key findings include that, (1) learners receive similar types of sign names to deaf signers but in different proportions; (2) getting a sign name is regarded as a significant…

The purpose of the empirical study, "The English-Language and Reading Achievement of a Cohort of Deaf Students Speaking and Signing Standard English: A Preliminary Study" (Nielsen et al., 2016), was to investigate the English-language abilities and reading achievement of a sample of students who were deaf and hard of hearing (D/HH) and…