Researchers have focused on how deaf signing children acquire and use American Sign Language (ASL). One sub-skill of ASL proficiency is ASL phonology. This includes the ability to isolate and manipulate parameters within signs (i.e., handshape, location, and movement). Expressively, signed language phonological fluency tasks have investigated…

The following article looks into the question of negative affixation in Polish Sign Language. Until today only one negative prefix and one negative suffix were recognized in Polish Sign Language. Our research investigates farther these two affixes looking into their etymologies, constraints and new examples of their use. The negative prefix…

This article discusses the function of a particular feature of sign language--mouth action--as it is expressed in various discourse contexts. Specifically, we examine forms of mouthing and mouth gesture as they are used in signed narrative and expository texts, highlighting the signers' choices during the production of these two text types. We…

Purpose: This study compares responses of children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) who use spoken language with responses of children who have typical hearing on a repeated word association task to evaluate lexical-semantic organization. Method: This study included 109 participants in early kindergarten or who had completed first grade. The…

To date, there has been no investigation into how metalinguistic terms, pertaining to English language teaching, are expressed in British Sign Language (BSL). This preliminary study explored how these terms are realised in BSL with the relevant professional community. The investigation was underpinned by translanguaging as a theoretical framework…

Children learning language efficiently process single words and activate semantic, phonological, and other features of words during recognition. We investigated lexical recognition in deaf children acquiring American Sign Language (ASL) to determine how perceiving language in the visual-spatial modality affects lexical recognition. Twenty native…

Lexical iconicity--signs or words that resemble their meaning--is overrepresented in children's early vocabularies. Embodied theories of language acquisition predict that symbols are more learnable when they are grounded in a child's firsthand experiences. As such, pantomimic iconic signs, which use the signer's body to represent a body, might be…

This study investigated the impact of language modality and age of acquisition on semantic fluency in American Sign Language (ASL) and English. Experiment 1 compared semantic fluency performance (e.g., name as many animals as possible in 1 min) for deaf native and early ASL signers and hearing monolingual English speakers. The results showed…

One of the fundamental issues for a language is its capacity to express argument structure unambiguously. This study presents evidence for the emergence and the incremental development of these basic mechanisms in a newly developing language, Central Taurus Sign Language. Our analyses identify universal patterns in both the emergence and…

In this study, we investigated how activation unfolds in sign production by examining whether signs that are not produced have their representations activated by semantics (cascading of activation). Deaf signers were tested with a picture-picture interference task. Participants were presented with pairs of overlapping pictures and named the green…

Two key areas of language development include semantic and phonological knowledge. Semantic knowledge relates to word and concept knowledge. Phonological knowledge relates to how language parameters combine to create meaning. We investigated signing deaf adults' and children's semantic and phonological sign generation via one-minute tasks,…

Languages typically express semantic components of motion events such as manner (roll) and path (down) in separate lexical items. We explore how these combinatorial possibilities of language arise by focusing on (i) gestures produced by deaf children who lack access to input from a conventional language (homesign); (ii) gestures produced by…

This study compared the lexical-semantic organization skills of bilingually developing deaf children in American Sign Language (ASL) and English with those of a monolingual hearing group. A repeated meaning-association paradigm was used to assess retrieval of semantic relations in deaf 6-10-year-olds exposed to ASL from birth by their deaf…

Lieberman, Borovsky, Hatrak, and Mayberry (2015) used a modified version of the visual-world paradigm to examine the real-time processing of signs in American Sign Language. They examined the activation of phonological and semantic competitors in native signers and late-learning signers and concluded that their results provide evidence that the…

Slovene Sign Language (SZJ) has as yet received little attention from linguists. This article presents some basic facts about SZJ, its history, current status, and a description of the Slovene Sign Language Corpus and Pilot Grammar (SIGNOR) project, which compiled and annotated a representative corpus of SZJ. Finally, selected quantitative data…