Iconicity is a relationship of resemblance between the form and meaning of a sign. Compelling evidence from diverse areas of the cognitive sciences suggests that iconicity plays a pivotal role in the processing, memory, learning, and evolution of both spoken and signed language, indicating that iconicity is a general property of language. However,…

Maritime Sign Language (MSL) is a Canadian, minority sign language that originally stems from British Sign Language (BSL). Currently used by elderly Deaf people in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland (and Labrador), it is a moribund language, having undergone language shift to American Sign Language (ASL). MSL is…

Cognitive mechanisms for sign language lexical access are fairly unknown. This study investigated whether phonological similarity facilitates lexical retrieval in sign languages using measures from a new lexical database for American Sign Language. Additionally, it aimed to determine which similarity metric best fits the present data in order to…

We set out to (i) assess the handwriting skills of signing deaf students, and (ii) examine the extent to which their text composition and spelling performances are linked to their handwriting efficiency. We asked 15 prelingually and profoundly deaf middle-school students (M = 15.18 years), all sign-language users, and a group of hearing students…

Understanding how language modality (i.e., signed vs. spoken) affects second language outcomes in hearing adults is important both theoretically and pedagogically, as it can determine the specificity of second language (L2) theory and inform how best to teach a language that uses a new modality. The present study investigated which…

Seneca elder Sandy Dowdy and her granddaughter Autumn Crouse direct a language nest school for children aged two to five years in a small longhouse-shaped building, "Ganöhsesge:kha:' Hë:nödeyë:sta'":, or the Faithkeepers School, on the Seneca Allegany Territory in upstate New York. They practice immersion teaching and use forms of…

In recent years, the intersection of cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and neuroscience with regard to deaf individuals has received increasing attention from a variety of academic and educational audiences. Both research and pedagogy have addressed questions about whether deaf children learn in the same ways that hearing children…

This article describes the case of a deaf native signer of American Sign Language (ASL) with a specific language impairment (SLI). School records documented normal cognitive development but atypical language development. Data include school records; interviews with the child, his mother, and school professionals; ASL and English evaluations; and a…

The present study was conducted in three parts. Each part analyzed theory of mind (ToM) development in children who are deaf in relation to mental verb and complement syntax understanding. In the first part, participants were given a series of tests for the purpose of correlational analysis of ToM, mental verb understanding, and memory for…

Every once in a while nature gives us insight into the human condition by providing us with a unique case whose special properties illuminate the species as a whole. Christopher is such an example. Despite disabilities which mean that everyday tasks are burdensome chores, Christopher is a linguistic wonder who can read, write, speak, understand…

The present study was designed to investigate the ways in which notions of semantics and phonology are acquired by adult naive learners of American Sign Language (ASL) when they are first exposed to a set of simple signs. First, a set of ASL signs was tested for nontransparency and a set of signs was selected for subsequent use. Next, a set of…

This study examined different perspectives of deaf education practitioners on deafness and reading comprehension. This involved a full deaf education support team comprising teachers of the deaf, communication support workers, and deaf instructors from a UK citywide service covering early years, primary and secondary settings. Using a focus group…

Deafblind readers are heterogeneous in reading skill acquisition. This qualitative study uses in-depth interviews and protocol analyses and queries the three deafblind adult participants in describing their metacomprehension, metacognitive and metalinguistic strategies used when reading different types of text. Using retrospective analysis, the…

When language learners are exposed to inconsistent probabilistic grammatical patterns, they sometimes impose consistency on the language instead of learning the variation veridically. The authors hypothesized that this regularization results from problems with word retrieval rather than from learning per se. One prediction of this, that easing the…

This study investigates the personal communication memories and experiences of adult deaf people during their childhoods in their homes. In order to obtain relevant information in depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty four Cypriot deaf individuals between the ages of 19 to 54 years with different family and school…