We present one of the first detailed studies on hesitation marking in a sign language. Based on the analysis of a set of monologues and dialogues from the "Corpus NGT" (Crasborn and Zwitserlood 2008; Crasborn, Zwitserlood, and Ros 2008), we describe the form and position of manual and nonmanual markers of hesitation in Sign Language of…

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…

The susceptibility to gaze cueing in deaf children aged 7-14 years old (N = 16) was tested using a nonlinguistic task. Participants performed a peripheral shape-discrimination task, whereas uninformative central gaze cues validly or invalidly cued the location of the target. To assess the role of sign language experience and bilingualism in deaf…

In 1924 Jabbar Baghcheban created a manual system that employed the phonetic characteristics of spoken Persian and Perso-Arabic orthography for use in the education of deaf students (Ibrahimi 2007). This article is a first exploration of variation and change in this system as it has evolved into the Iranian manual alphabet. Data on the…

It is yet unclear whether congenitally deaf cochlear implant (CD CI) users' visual and multisensory emotion perception is influenced by their history in sign language acquisition. We hypothesized that early-signing CD CI users, relative to late-signing CD CI users and hearing, non-signing controls, show better facial expression recognition and…

In this paper the prosodic structure of American Sign Language (ASL) narratives is analyzed in deaf native signers (L1-D), hearing native signers (L1-H), and highly proficient hearing second language signers (L2-H). The results of this study show that the prosodic patterns used by these groups are associated both with their ASL language experience…

This study investigated differences in the phonological knowledge and reading skill of deaf adults using three experimental conditions that tested sensitivity to syllables, rhyme, and phonemes. Analysis of response latencies and accuracy in the three awareness tasks demonstrated that skilled deaf readers had superior phonological awareness skill…

This study investigated the perception of voice onset time (VOT) in speech produced during simultaneous communication (SC). Four normally hearing, experienced sign language users were recorded under SC and speech alone (SA) conditions speaking stimulus words with voiced and voiceless initial consonants embedded in a sentence. Twelve…

Vowel durations following the production of voiced and voiceless stop consonants produced during simultaneous communication (SC) were investigated by recording sign language users during SC and speech alone (SA). Under natural speaking conditions, or speaking alone (SA), vowels following voiced stop consonants are longer in duration than vowels…

This study investigated the overall intelligibility of speech produced during simultaneous communication (SC). Four hearing, experienced sign language users were recorded under SC and speech alone (SA) conditions speaking Boothroyd's (1985) forced-choice phonetic contrast material designed for measurement of speech intelligibility. Twelve…