Through participation in LGBTQI conferences, one can gain political knowledge, leadership skills, professional networking opportunities, and personal development experiences. These opportunities become more complex to navigate for Deaf individuals who hold other marginalized identities, such as those who identify as Queer Trans Deaf People of…

The roles of visual sonority and handshape markedness in sign language acquisition and production were investigated. In Experiment 1, learners were taught sign-nonobject correspondences that varied in sign movement sonority and handshape markedness. Results from a sign-picture matching task revealed that high sonority signs were more accurately…

Children, from birth, acquire literacy within various contexts, including in early childhood educational settings. In the United States, there has been renewed attention from the public, the government and educators to increase the quality of early childhood education. Particular focus has been on settings serving children who are at risk for of…

Little literature exists documenting how K-12 American Sign Language-English interpreters are supervised or evaluated, or how supervision and evaluation affect interpreters and deaf and hard of hearing students. To address this gap, the author asked 230 educational interpreters about their experiences of supervision. Using a critical policy…

Families with deaf parents and hearing children often demonstrate bimodal bilingualism, using both a signed and a spoken language. This study uses an audience design framework to analyze the home language use of two bimodal bilingual families in the United States. The school-age children in these families appeared to design their utterances for…

This article explores the available research literature on language development and language interventions among deaf and hard of hearing (d/hh) children. This literature is divided into two broad categories: Research on natural languages (specifically American Sign Language and spoken English) and research on communication systems (specifically…

Dialogic reading is an instructional strategy that has shown promise for supporting the reading development of children both with and without disabilities. Specifically, there may be positive effects of vocabulary knowledge, morphological knowledge, participation during reading, and emergent literacy skills. However, the knowledge base on the…

Despite immense variability across languages, people can learn to understand any human language, spoken or signed. What neural mechanisms allow people to comprehend language across sensory modalities? When people listen to speech, electrophysiological oscillations in auditory cortex entrain to slow (<8 Hz) fluctuations in the acoustic envelope.…

The status of American Sign Language (ASL) has gained academic acceptance in higher education confirmed primarily by hearing institutional members. At the time of this writing, there were no studies concerning support for ASL faculty members by program administrators who are Deaf. There were few documented studies on Deaf faculty members and…

Visual phonics, a system of 46 hand-shapes with equivalent symbols, when used together are called "cues." These cues couple with the 46 phoneme sounds of spoken English. Visual phonics was originally developed by a mother for her deaf son to aid in teaching speech and reading. This study was designed to compare students in two different…

This article presents theoretical orientations and practical applications for the assessment of d/Deaf and hard of hearing (d/Dhh) children. It discusses current approaches to assessment and the factors affecting d/Dhh children's participation in assessments using those approaches. Gaps in the field around access to appropriate assessments are…

This article shares the story of Jose, a student that presents an extreme example of what can happen to deaf and hard of hearing children in our nation's schools when assessment data is either inaccurate or ignored and parental input is absent. Presenting a unique challenge to the educational system, each deaf or hard of hearing child is at the…

Brenda Perrodin is a teacher in the Parent-Infant Program at the Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center's Kendall Demonstration Elementary School (KDES), on the campus of Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. With a bachelor's degree in early childhood education and a master's degree in family-centered early education from Gallaudet…

The focus of this article is the experiences of Deaf Philadelphians vis-à-vis language policy and practice at PSD. We delineate the official and unofficial communication philosophies and pedagogies from the school's inception to present day, providing a framework for understanding the trajectory of linguistic freedom and restriction of its…

Teaching young children with language delays to say or sign the word "more" has had strong support from the literature since the 1970s (Bloom & Lahey, 1978; Holland, 1975; Lahey & Bloom, 1977; Lederer, 2002). Semantically, teaching children the word/sign "more" is supported by research on early vocabulary development…