A primary tenet underlying American Sign Language/English bilingual education for deaf students is that early access to a visual language, developed in conjunction with language planning principles, provides a foundation for literacy in English. The goal of this study is to obtain an emic perspective on bilingual deaf readers transitioning from…

Acquisition of phoneme-grapheme correspondences, a key concept of the alphabetic principle, was examined in young children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) using a semantic association strategy embedded in two interventions, the Children's Early Intervention and Foundations for Literacy. Single-subject design experiments using multiple…

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…

The gap between oral and manual production of the 159 profoundly deaf children in total communication programs indicated that spoken English did not develop simultaneously with manually coded English and that Ss educated in programs using manually coded English did not develop competence with early developing English syntax faster than those not…

Research is reviewed on bilingual education and its application to the education of hearing-impaired students. Assessment procedures for obtaining valid samples of language behavior, distinguishing between competence and performance, and considering language variation are emphasized. (CL)

The relative effectiveness of total communication and oral communication training in a parent-assisted, home-based language intervention program was studied with 15 Down's syndrome children, 18-36 months old. (Author/SEW)

Three Spanish deaf preschoolers were taught receptive vocabulary in oral English, English sign-mix, oral Spanish, Spanish sign-mix, and sign alone. Subject one learned best using sign alone. Subject two performed best using oral Spanish or sign alone. Subject three seemed to profit from sign, Spanish sign-mix, or oral English. (Author/SW)

This is a selection of papers that have appeared in the journal "Sign Language Studies" between 1972 and 1979. The aim is to provide the reader with some knowledge of the world as signers see it. The book is for academic decision-makers, teachers and parents of deaf students, as well as the intellectually curious. Following an introductory essay,…

This reprint of a 1970 article examines some emergent concepts of psycholinguistics and relates them to the development of a language-training program for children with deafness. It discusses the stages and process of language development, and the advantages and disadvantages of the total-communication approach, oral communication, and the…

Reports on an investigation into the gestural repertoire of a deaf child raised in an oral environment. (AM)

Questions asked by parents of 12 young hearing children were compared with those asked by hearing parents of 17 preschoolers with deafness who used various linguistic input models (i.e., oral English only, cued speech, signed/manual English). Similar parent questioning strategies were found among groups matched for mean length of utterance.…

A mother of a deaf child recounts her earlier commitment to an oralist position, her gradual realization that she was asking her child to do the impossible, and the child's rapid acquisition of language when allowed and encouraged to use signs. The importance of hearing parents learning sign language is stressed. (DB)

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine and compare the development of proto-imperative and proto-declarative utterances in normally developing, non-neonatally screened, profoundly deaf toddlers. Method: Both types of proto-declarative are considered to be the most basic prelinguistic and early linguistic communicative functions.…

This study focuses on the language and literacy worlds of three profoundly deaf preschool children, whose lack of a strong spoken English base provided an opportunity to explore the relationship between spoken language development and written language development and to investigate young children's written language development in light of the…

Repercussions of "Language and Education of the Deaf" by Herbert R. Kohl are examined as a followup. The original study described the education and achievement of profoundly deaf individuals in America, presented a critique of the literature that had grown around the problems of the deaf, and focused on the relative failure of deaf education.…