Two experiments are presented that investigate the processing of pronominal reference in American Sign Language. Experiment one indicated that pronoun activation was not immediate, and there was no strong evidence for the inhibition of nonreferents. Experiment two was designed to investigate whether the pronoun also activated a representation of…

Investigates whether the reasons for deaf children's poor achievement lie in their strategy development. Reports that structural aspects of sign language counting may influence deaf children's thinking in a way that does not lead to a developed conceptual knowledge base, but rather to refined procedural competence. (Contains 31 references.)…

This study investigated speaking rate and voice onset time (VOT) in speech produced during simultaneous communication (SC) by speakers with normal hearing. The somewhat enlarged voicing contrast during SC was consistent with previous findings regarding the influence of rate changes on the temporal fine structure of speech and voicing contrast…

Proposes that a mute verbal modeling system gets lodged in the brain, because the brain is human and modeling, representing, and communicating create connections in the brain. (Author/VWL)

Presents results of a quantitative analysis that evaluates the incidence of iconicity in a sign language, Italian Sign Language (LIS). Argues that the high incidence of iconicity is a response to a need for economy. To justify the coexistence of iconicity and arbitrariness in the LIS lexicon, suggests a revisiting of the notion of arbitrariness.…

Part of a large-scale study on variation in American Sign Language, this article examines variation in the form of the sign DEAF, which can be produced by moving the forefinger from ear to chin, from chin to ear, or by contacting the lower cheek. Multivariate analysis of more than 1600 tokens of DEAF extracted from sociolinguistic interviews shows…

Argues that a 1997 study of WH-movement in American Sign Language (ASL) proposing leftward syntactic movement uses incorrect interpretations of the data and can not account for the facts of the language. A previously-proposed position that ASL WH-phrases move rightward, and that universal grammar must allow the option of rightward movement, is…

Describes Sign in Education, a pilot program in the United Kingdom that integrated Deaf children and hearing children in a hearing classroom with a culturally Deaf teacher who taught the national curriculum in British Sign Language one afternoon a week. Explores the advantage to the Deaf community, as well as the majority culture of adopting such…

Shows that the architecture of a children's poetic text is based on systematic use of repetition and contrast at different levels of analysis, which allow the continuous flow of gesture to be segmented into structural units of different relative size. Suggests the study of poetry allows the isolation of universals of language. (Author/VWL)

We present the design of a new 3D animation tool for self-teaching (signing and reading) finger spelling the first basic component in learning any sign language. We have designed a highly realistic hand with natural animation of the finger motions. Smoothness of motion (in real time) is achieved via programmable blending of animation segments. The…

Three languages are widely used in schools in Kenya English, Kiswahili and Kenya Sign Language. Many pupils with hearing impairments are taught separately from the mainstream, in specialist settings. The fact that most of the formal teaching, assessment and examination processes in Kenyan schools rely upon spoken and written English compounds the…

Sign languages modulate the production of signs in space and use this spatial modulation to refer back to entities--to maintain coreference. We ask here whether spatial modulation is so fundamental to language in the manual modality that it will be invented by individuals asked to create gestures on the spot. English speakers were asked to…

This follow-up study identifies the relationship between pairings of parental hearing status and the regularity of signing with the deaf or hard of hearing student at home and in the classroom. Additionally, given that the incidence of intergenerational deafness has a major genetic component, parental hearing status in relation to the child's…

In the few studies that have been conducted, researchers have typically found that deaf adolescents have more mental health difficulties than their hearing peers and that, within the deaf groups, those who use spoken language have better mental health functioning than those who use sign language. This study investigated the hypotheses that mental…

It is approaching a half century since Bill Stokoe published his revolutionary monograph, "Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication Systems of the American Deaf." It is rare for a work of innovative scholarship to spark a social as well as an intellectual revolution, but that is just what Stokoe's 1960 paper did. And it is…