Minimal expressions are at the heart of interaction: Interjections like "Huh?" and "Mhm" keep conversations flowing by establishing and reinforcing intersubjectivity among interlocutors. Crosslinguistic research has identified that similar interactional pressures can yield structurally similar words (e.g., to initiate repair…

In 1988, members of the American deaf community protested the appointment of a hearing person as the president of Gallaudet University, the world's only university for deaf and hard of hearing students. After a week of protest, the university's board of trustees capitulated and bowed to all the protester's demands. As the protesters engaged in a…

Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) proposes that there is a large system of conceptual metaphors in our cognition known as event-structure metaphors (ESMs). Through ESMs, we understand the conceptual domains of actions, causes, changes, states, purposes, and so forth in terms of the aspects of the domain of motion in space. ESMs are largely…

Sign language interpreters work with a variety of consumer populations throughout their careers. One such population, referred to as "emergent signers," consists of consumers who are in the process of learning American Sign Language, and who rely on interpreters during their language acquisition period. A gap in the research is revealed…

Vocabulary development is an essential linguistic component of later English literacy skills (National Reading Panel 2000). However, very few studies have addressed the promotion of vocabulary development in deaf children who are American Sign Language users (Luckner and Cooke 2010). Therefore, this qualitative collective case study examined the…

A small group of interpreters was interviewed with regard to their view of learning ASL and becoming bicultural. A model of identity was then postulated based on Hegel's dialectic (Wheat 2012) of thesis (presuppositions, stereotypes, or theories about ASL and the Deaf community), antithesis (conflicting experiences), and synthesis (new…

This article puts forward a solution to the impending shortage of culturally and linguistically competent interpreters: the education of heritage signers as heritage language learners. It examines the current landscape of American Sign Language (ASL) as a course of study and the difficulties heritage signers report when they begin learning ASL. In…

Hearing native signers often learn sign language as their first language and acquire features that are characteristic of sign languages but are not present in equivalent ways in English (e.g., grammatical facial expressions and the structured use of space for setting up tokens and surrogates). Previous research has indicated that bimodal…

This study takes advantage of a novel methodology--the use of a single culturally-meaningful text written in English and presented to different audiences in ASL--to examine the ways in which Deaf native signers utilize contextualization strategies in order to match the perceived linguistic and informational needs of an audience. We demonstrate,…

Research presented here describes the sign names and the customs of name allocation within the British Deaf community. While some aspects of British Sign Language sign names and British Deaf naming customs differ from those in most Western societies, there are many similarities. There are also similarities with other societies outside the more…

Vincent, a hearing child of deaf parents who was fluent in ASL by the time of his first exposure to a spoken language (English) at about age 3, needed only a few months to learn the distinction between English first person pronouns and pronouns referring to other grammatical persons, but it was several years before he learned all the other…

This article argues that poetry written by nineteenth-century British and American deaf poets played an important role in the period's sign language debates. By placing the publication of this poetry in the context of public exhibitions of deaf students, I suggest that the poetry was mobilized to publicly defend the linguistic and intellectual…

Discusses deaf criminal suspects in two categories. The first involves deaf suspects who are proficient in the use of one or more of the following languages or modes: American Sign language, manually coded English, contact language, and indigenous or foreign sign languages. The second involves deaf suspects who are not proficient in any language.…

In this article, the author discusses why it is difficult to transliterate American Sign Language (ASL) and the visual realities of a deaf individual's life into creative texts written in English. Even on the sentence level, she says, written English resists the unsettling presence of transliteration across modalities. A sign cannot be "said." If…

Examines from a creolist perspective the claim that American Sign Language (ASL) has creole origins. Applying criteria based on the work of various creole researchers, the article concludes that the evidence for creole origins of ASL does not meet any usual definition of a creole. The article discusses lexical and morhosyntactic similarities…