In October 2023, a new deaf student, "Zuri," showed up in my second grade classroom. This often happens. Parents move into and out of the district for work, and it is common to get a new student in the middle of the year without warning. Zuri's eyes were wide when she came into the classroom, and she looked scared. Who were all these…

Purpose: The Deaf community is an ethnolinguistic minority whose lack of access to mainstream health information limits health literacy. This study describes barriers to teaching high school health education in US K-12 Deaf schools. Methods: An online survey with English and American Sign Language (ASL) instructions were emailed to administrators…

The SKI-HI Deaf Mentor Program is an early intervention model that supports families in creating an effective bilingual environment (American Sign Language [ASL]/English) with their deaf or hard of hearing child. The program can be adopted and implemented in any state. A Deaf Mentor is a deaf or hard of hearing adult specifically trained to engage…

Research on the acquisition of American Sign Language (ASL) by deaf autistic children has documented similarities to the linguistic profile of hearing children on the autism spectrum and has identified sign-specific phenomena that could serve as clinical markers of autism in the deaf population. However, the acquisition of a signed language by…

This study investigates the communication practices of four teachers in 3rd to 6th grade classrooms with 9 deaf students with limited language proficiency and in stages of emergent writing development. Analyzing language modalities, utterance types, and class interactivity, we found that teachers using American sign language used student-centered…

Since its publication in 2013, the Visual Communication and Sign Language (VCSL) Checklist has been widely utilized to assess the development of early American Sign Language skills of deaf children from birth to age 5. However, little research has been published using the results of VCSL assessments. Notably, no psychometric analyses have been…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to determine whether and how learning American Sign Language (ASL) is associated with spoken English skills in a sample of ASL-English bilingual deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children. Method: This cross-sectional study of vocabulary size included 56 DHH children between 8 and 60 months of age who were…

The discussion on the role of American Sign Language (ASL) in deaf students' reading development has been long and contentious. The students' limited knowledge of English has been commonly perceived as a culprit in making reading difficult. However, a more nuanced explanation of reading performance and its relationship with competence in ASL's…

Multiple studies have reported mathematics underachievement for students who are deaf, but the onset, scope, and causes of this phenomenon remain understudied. Early language deprivation might be one factor influencing the acquisition of numbers. In this study, we investigated a basic and fundamental mathematical skill, automatic magnitude…

There are over 135,000 deaf/hard of hearing students enrolled in postsecondary institutions in the U.S. However, deaf students who use sign language may not be aware of their sign language skills, resulting in accommodations that do not provide full access to postsecondary course content and reduced degree completion rates compared to their…

There is a significant lack of research on the participation of Deaf student athletes in sports, particularly within Deaf-centric environments where American Sign Language (ASL) is the primary language. This study addresses this gap by documenting and recognizing the unique experiences of Deaf student athletes at Gallaudet University, the world's…

According to a recent Modern Language Association Report, American Sign Language (ASL) has displaced German at the college level in the United States to become the third most frequently studied language with between 100 and 200,000 students enrolled since 2013 (Looney & Lusin, 2019). ASL is an option for fulfilling foreign language…

"Sign Language Studies" is introducing a new section titled "Reports on Ongoing Research." These short research briefs are intended to provide a format for researchers to report on projects for which research is ongoing but for which a timely research brief would be of interest to the "Sign Language Studies" (SLS)…

This dissertation presents the judgment of what is 'correct' American Sign Language (ASL) structure by the younger generation, using the word order strategies that were used in older generation signers, as well as younger generation attitudes towards the ideology of ASL being a SOV language. This study used an on-line survey to evaluate 83…

Maritime Sign Language (MSL) emerged in the easternmost provinces in Canada with origins traced as far back as to the Weald, a region in Southeastern England. Therefore, British sign language is a root language that led to the creation of MSL. This type of language emersion is known as a Deaf community sign language, which occurs when Deaf people…