Comments on questions regarding Deaf culture, with particular reference to black Americans. It is suggested that it is essential to acknowledge that within cultures there is a range of views and values and that it is of fundamental importance to construct theories that embody that understanding as well as a dialectical relationship. (CK)

Productions of sentence stimuli by five ASL-English bilinguals and six signed-English users who know no ASL were compared in two conditions (speech-alone or signing-alone, speech and signing combined). Speech took longer combined than alone, whereas signed English took longer alone than combined. (Author/CR)

Every day, teachers face the time-consuming task of adapting materials from curricula that do not meet their students' needs or match their learning styles. This article discusses ready-made literacy units specifically designed for teachers of deaf and hard of hearing students. The units were part of the Cornerstones Project, an activity of the…

This article examines storytelling events for children in a library and a children's bookstore in which storytellers are accompanied by sign language interpreters. The result is that both hearing and Deaf children participate in a literacy event in which storyteller and interpreter produce a multilingual, multimodal and multimedial narrative.…

This is a dissertation study focusing on the ability of deaf children to fast map common and newly learned novel fingerspelled words through a training task. It also explored the relationship between the ability to learn fingerspelled words and the children's reading and vocabulary skills. Learning was assessed using five domains: imitation,…

When hearing speakers address a mixed audience of hearing and deaf participants,[1] they have a choice of three methods by which to convey the information in their presentation. They may choose to use English and provide an English-to-ASL interpreter, use ASL and provide an ASL-to-English interpreter, or use simultaneous communication (SimCom).…

This study examined young children's hand usage when they produced American Sign Language signs and while they played, in order to determine their hand preference in early signing and to compare their hand use in signing with their hand preference in other, nonlinguistic, motor actions. Subjects were 24 young children (from the age of 12 months or…

Reports on one aspect of an ongoing study of language contact in the American deaf community. The ultimate goal of the study is a linguistic description of contact signing and a reexamination of claims that it is a pidgin. Patterns of language use are reviewed and the role of demographic information in judgments is examined. (29 references) (GLR)

This article reflects on the efficacy debates for the instructional use of natural sign language with deaf students, in particular American Sign Language (ASL) versus systems of Manually Coded English (MCE). It responds to an earlier review article and urges greater tolerance of opposing views, respect for family choice in the matter, and better…

Re-examination of data on noun-verb pair comprehension and production in Australian and American Sign Language confirm the existence of formationally related noun-verb pairs in Auslan in which the verb displays a single movement and the noun displays a repeated movement. Overall, the derivational process appears closely linked to an iconic base…

We introduce a new method of sign language subtitling aimed at young deaf children who have not acquired reading skills yet, and can communicate only via signs. The method is based on: 1) the recently developed concept of "semantroid[TM]" (an animated 3D avatar limited to head and hands); 2) the design, development, and psychophysical evaluation…

This article sheds light on issues concerning discrimination in the history of deaf people in Sweden in the 20th century. With the help of a specific typology of concepts for analysing discrimination exercised through the use of language, it is shown how the categorization of the hearing impaired has changed over time and how, in this process of…

The view that a deaf child with autism is just that--a deaf child first (because of the critical importance of communication) and an autistic child second--is the more prevalent today, especially in larger educational programs. But this was not always the case. In the past, placement decisions often were determined in the opposite way: Many deaf…

Explaining the importance of a good foundation in writing to educators would be a case of preaching to the choir. The same can be said about identifying the connection between reading and writing. Writing can occur in the primary classroom in three ways. Demonstration writing happens when the teacher composes and writes in front of the class,…

In the course of language development children must solve arbitrary form-to-meaning mappings, in which semantic components are encoded onto linguistic labels. Because sign languages describe motion and location of entities through iconic movements and placement of the hands in space, child signers may find spatial semantics-to-language mapping…