Reports on a study which followed the language development of a hearing son of deaf parents from his seventeenth month to twenty-third month. Various aspects of the child's language acquisition in sign and speech are described, as is his early ability to alternate languages (sign and speech) according to addressee. (SED)

Discusses the hypothesis that right hemispheric cognitive processes underlie establishment of meaning in language and in processing of linguistic gestalts, and examines several lines of evidence. Also examined is the hypothesis that societal complexity is related to differences in relative dependence upon cognitive processes controlled by cerebral…

Investigates the differences in the use of certain verbs of movement and location between native ASL learners and children of hearing parents exposed to signing outside the home. Describes the children's use of phonology, morphology, and syntax in repeating target utterances. Relates results to interaction of language acquisition and motor…

Suggests that certain teaching methods are successful in teaching both English to the deaf and English as a second language (ESL) to remote-language-base students. Presents characteristics of American Sign Language and guidelines for managing deaf students in an ESL classroom. (SED)

Concludes that differences exist in the classroom behavior of some deaf and some hearing teachers and that what defines the successful teacher is task persistence and clarity. (FL)

Describes code shifting study in communicative behavior of hearing child interacting with deaf child and mother, both of whom signed. Hearing child knew signing, but did not sign at home. Although communication change occurred, code shifting was influenced more by motivational variables and by hearing child's own flexibility with language than by…

A study was conducted to determine post-secondary coaches' perceptions of American Sign Language (ASL) and the level of involvement with ASL when coaching post-secondary athletes who are deaf and hard of hearing. Seventy-three hearing coaches of post-secondary athletes who were deaf and hard of hearing and twenty-two post-secondary athletes who…

Ways in which the lexicon of Irish Sign Language (ISL) has developed, and how it is being continually extended, are examined. Change occurs in several ways. Research to date indicates that there are 59 basic handshapes, from which all vocabulary items are created. Classifiers are used extensively in the nominal and verbal system of ISL, and 15 of…

This report discusses the outcomes of a practicum designed to address the lack of parent participation in American Sign Language (ASL) training by parents of children with hearing impairments. Using a pretest-posttest design, 46 parents of children who are deaf and receive services from a school for the deaf were surveyed. Based on the needs…

Demographic information indicates that 6% of the general population is hard of hearing or deaf; however, deaf people are significantly underrepresented in drug and alcohol treatment on any given day. Deaf people are a minority whose primary language is American Sign Language (ASL), and information about substance abuse is not easily represented in…

The purpose of this study was to investigate innovative performance assessments developed by the instructor in an American Sign Language (ASL) course at an urban undergraduate university. The performance assessments engaged students in higher order thinking skills as they demonstrated their learning. Course purpose, instructional objectives,…

A month by month series of notes by the teacher describes problems and progress of a day class for seven deaf or hard of hearing children (ages 5 to 15 years) which stressed total communication in a prescriptive approach to teaching. (Author/DB)

Handshapes with single finger extension are examined in data from 10 sign languages: American, Australian, British, Finnish, French, Japanese, Providence Island, Rennell Island, Indian, and Swedish. It is concluded that a theory of marking can be developed along the same lines as for spoken language, with only the physiology differing. (Author/MSE)

Investigates sentence processing in a visual-gestural language by testing signers' recognition for American Sign Language sentences. Results indicate that signers decompose a complex sign into its lexical and inflectional components during sentence comprehension and remember the meaning expressed by these components rather than remembering the…

Described is a means of telecommunication for the deaf. American video telephone (Picturephone) is a telephone for the deaf which transmits a picture of the sender who is able to use American Sign Language (ASL) and to fingerspell to the reader using video transmission. (DS)