During the past few years, the teachers and staff at Kendall Demonstration Elementary School (KDES) have reviewed research to identify factors that positively impact language development for deaf and hard of hearing children, and established language and communication practices to reflect what they have learned. Based on the research, which…

Bilinguals who are fluent in American Sign Language (ASL) and English often produce "code-blends"--simultaneously articulating a sign and a word while conversing with other ASL-English bilinguals. To investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying code-blend processing, we compared picture-naming times (Experiment 1) and semantic categorization…

Learners' ability to recognize linguistic contrasts in American Sign Language (ASL) was investigated using a paired-comparison discrimination task. Minimal pairs containing contrasts in five linguistic categories (i.e., the formational parameters of movement, handshape, orientation, and location in ASL phonology, and a category comprised of…

Fundamental to infants' acquisition of their native language is an inherent interest in the language spoken around them over non-linguistic environmental sounds. The following studies explored whether the bias for linguistic signals in hearing infants is specific to speech, or reflects a general bias for all human language, spoken and signed.…

The placement of laughter in the speech of hearing individuals is not random but "punctuates" speech, occurring during pauses and at phrase boundaries where punctuation would be placed in a transcript of a conversation. For speakers, language is dominant in the competition for the vocal tract since laughter seldom interrupts spoken phrases. For…

Short-term recall of printed English words by deaf signers of American Sign Language was found to be less than that of hearing subjects when ordered recall, but not when free recall, was required. Results were consistent with the hypothesis that a speech-based code facilitates retention of order information. (Author/RD)

For the study reported in this article, Deaf couples were interviewed at two different times regarding their views on deaf education. Questions in the first interview focused on the parents' views of their preschool children's education as well as their opinion of their "own" school experiences. Questions also covered language use at school and…