This study was designed to evaluate the potential of simultaneous communication (sign and speech together) to support classroom learning by college students who use cochlear implants (CIs). Metacognitive awareness of learning also was evaluated. A within-subjects design involving 40 implant users indicated that the student participants learned…

Over the years attempts have been made to standardize sign languages. This form of language planning has been tackled by a variety of agents, most notably teachers of Deaf students, social workers, government agencies, and occasionally groups of Deaf people themselves. Their efforts have most often involved the development of sign language books…

The past three decades of activism for linguistic human rights (Skutnabb-Kangas 2000) have witnessed examples of language planning by various national and supranational actors in national and international spaces, with an exchange of ideas and strategies employed by national, regional, and worldwide organizations. In many countries a key goal of…

Information about cancer, the disease that kills more Americans than any other except heart disease, is essential. In some ways, information is our first line of defense. It allows us to identify individual risk factors, to note when a problem means we should see a professional, and to avoid activities that might put us at risk. However,…

The paper describes an e-learning system called Advanced Learning Space that was developed at the Technical University of Liberec. The system provides a personalized virtual work space and promotes communication among students and their teachers. The core of the system is a module that can be used to automatically record, store and playback…

Author and husband, Roger Williams, is hearing and signs fluently, and author and wife, Sherry Williams, is deaf and uses both speech and signs, although she is most comfortable signing. As parents of six children--deaf and hearing--they are determined to encourage their children to do their best, and they always set their expectations high. They…

A commentary on Williams's (2012) invited article on the use of adapted vocabulary learning interventions focuses on three areas: (a) Vocabulary interventions with storybook reading originally designed for hearing children can be adapted for deaf children. (b) Teachers are invited to reflect on how the read-aloud process in English differs from…

Students who are deaf and use sign language frequently have language delays that affect their literacy skills. Students who use American Sign Language (ASL) often lack fluent language models in both the home and school settings, delaying both the development of a first language and the development of literacy in printed English. Mediated and…

This dissertation describes the features of co-speech gestures of English/ASL bilinguals and addresses three main questions: 1) How do English/ASL bilinguals gesture differently than non-signers? 2) How do native ASL/English bilinguals gesture differently than non-native English/ASL bilinguals? 3) Do English/ASL bilinguals gesture differently to…

In Scandinavia and some other countries, a bilingual-bicultural approach to deaf education was celebrated in national programs from the mid-1980s until the broad popularity of cochlear implantation in middle 2000s created a shift back to an emphasis on spoken language for many deaf children. At the same time, only a few studies evaluated the…

Several scholars have asked what are the relations between two recently developed concepts, Deaf ethnicity and Deafhood. The emergence of these concepts, along with others such as "audism" (Humphries 1977), "dysconscious audism," "Sign Language Peoples," and "Deaf Gain" reflects important attempts by Deaf…

Child First is a national campaign to ensure that deaf children have their right to language recognized and fulfilled regardless of which educational method is specified in the Individualized Education Program (IEP). Whether the child's family embraces American Sign Language (ASL), speech reading, a system of signs that encodes English, or a…

Deaf children whose hearing losses prevent them from accessing spoken language and whose hearing parents have not exposed them to sign language develop gesture systems, called "homesigns", which have many of the properties of natural language--the so-called resilient properties of language. We explored the resilience of structure built…

Two experiments investigated Chinese deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) adolescents' recognition of category names in an innovative task of semantic categorization. In each trial, the category-name target appeared briefly at the screen center followed by two words or two pictures for two basic-level exemplars of high or middle typicality, which…

In recent years, researchers have turned their attention to the cognitive impact of bilingualism, and the benefits of using two languages have become increasingly apparent. Children raised in bilingual families exhibit stronger awareness of the style and tone of language, stronger cognitive development, and higher levels of reading skill than…