A program to involve institutional staff in developing manual sign language skills with six profoundly retarded persons was evaluated. Results indicated that all participating residents learned to communicate with signing during structured interactions on their living unit and the skills maintained during follow-up assessments ranging from 39 to…

The Paget-Gorman Sign System, a signed English approach shown to be effective with deaf or hard of hearing children, has been helpful in developing phrase structure in hearing impaired mentally retarded students. (CL)

Investigates sign learning as a function of sign translucency (ease of relating a sign to its referents) and referential concreteness. Naive sign learners attempted to learn a list of sign-referent pairs. Signs high in translucency and referents high in concreteness facilitated learning; low levels of each variable inhibited learning. (Author/PJM)

The author cites research that casts doubt upon the use of total communication as a means of facilitating speech, communication between parent and child, academic achievement, and vocabulary development in hearing-impaired children. He states that the Alexander Graham Bell Association is not antimanual communication, but rather prospeech. (CL)

Explores the social relation between a natural sign language and the language of the dominant hearing culture, focusing on language attitudes, status and affiliation, language contact influence, language variation and change, and language standardization. (58 references) (CB)

A comparison of terms from the lexical domain of color naming across 10 different sign languages from 7 different sign language groups suggested that, for naming colors, sign languages follow universal patterns not dependent upon the channel of language expression and reception. (Author)

Carol Padden's influential framework for observations of deaf culture is examined. Some potentially potent socio-anthropological ideas are used to sketch implications for revisions of such a framework, adjusting concepts of culture and asking how notions of deaf culture are constructed. (Contains 55 references.) (Author/LB)

Examines a traditional Mayan village in the Yucatan where deaf inhabitants use a sign language that is distinct from that used in other Mexican communities. Because the hearing villagers are able to communicate in this sign language, the deaf inhabitants are almost fully integrated into the social and economic life of the village. (22 references)…

Twenty master Sign Language interpreters transliterated monologue containing normal speech pausing and then transliterated same passage with inappropriate pausing and reduced intonation. When transliterating, interpreters render source message pauses with visible signals. Interpreters render different kinds of auditory pauses with different kinds…

Spanish Sign Language (SSL) is now the second most used sign language. This article introduces resources for the study of SSL, including three SSL dictionaries--two from Argentina and one from Puerto Rico. Differences in SSL between and within the two countries are noted. Implications for deaf educators in North America are drawn. (Author/DB)

Three experimental techniques that can be used to investigate the gradient of discrete nature of intonational differences, the semantic task, the imitation task, and the pitch range task are discussed and evaluated. It is pointed out that categorical perception is a sufficient but not a necessary, property of phonological discreteness. (Author/VWL)

Explores the role and status of hearing people within the Deaf community, in particular sign language interpreters. Indicates that hearing people and sign language interpreters in particular can become members of the Deaf community. (Author/VWL)

The nature of the representations maintained in verbal working memory is a topic of debate. Some authors argue for a modality-dependent code, tied to particular sensory or motor systems. Others argue for a modality-neutral code. Sign language affords a unique perspective because it factors out the effects of modality. In an fMRI experiment, deaf…

This paper examines the impact of auditory deprivation and sign language use on the enhancement of location memory and hemispheric specialization using two matching tasks. Forty-one deaf signers and non-signers and 51 hearing signers and non-signers were tested on location memory for shapes and objects (Study 1) and on categorical versus…

This study compared the effects of Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) and sign language training on the acquisition of mands (requests for preferred items) of students with autism. The study also examined the differential effects of each modality on students' acquisition of vocal behavior. Participants were two elementary school students…