Describes systematic communication systems developed by two deaf children of hearing parents who were placed in an oral education program at the time their deafness was diagnosed. Children did not have access to spoken or signed language model. Evidence shows children develop a communication system based on inconsistently used gestures of hearing…

Reviews previous work on phonological variation in American Sign Language (ASL) and examines issues that distinguish spoken languages. Presents an account of the data collection, reduction, and analysis, with an emphasis on issues particular to the analysis. Discusses implications of the results, including possible change in ASL. (Author/VWL)

Recent research has shown that sign language varieties in India and Pakistan are related. This report examines the possible relationship of sign language varieties in India and Pakistan to those in Nepal by analyzing comparative lexical data from sign language varieties in the three countries. (10 references) (VWL)

Explores and describes from a crosslinguistic perspective, some of the major structural irregularities that characterize poetry in Italian Sign Language and distinguish poetic from nonpoetic texts. Reviews findings of previous studies of signed language poetry, and points out issues that need to be clarified to provide a more accurate description…

Linguistic descriptions of sign languages are important to the recognition of their linguistic status. These languages are an essential part of the cultural heritage of the communities that create and use them and vital in the education of deaf children. They are also the reference point in language acquisition studies. Ours is exploratory…

Most studies on the Stroop effect (unintentional automatic word processing) have been restricted to English speakers using vocal responses. Little is known about this effect with deaf signers. The study compared Stroop task responses among four different samples: deaf participants from a Japanese-language environment and from an English-language…

Discoveries about the acquisition of American Sign Language (ASL) by deaf children are reviewed. Current research shows that ASL has developed as a fully autonomous language with complex organizational properties not derived from spoken language. Like spoken languages, ASL exhibits formal structuring at two levels and similar organizational…

Field researchers of sign language are the target of this methodological guide. The prospective researcher is briefed on the rationale of sign language study as language study and as distinct from the study of kinesics. Subjects covered include problems of translating, use of interpreters, and ethics. Instruments for obtaining social and language…

Four keynote papers, presented at an international conference on sign language research, discussed general linguistic issues of sign language, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and language acquisition. (CB)

Examines the role played by relative clauses in American Sign Language. (FL)

Author presents data on Washoe, a chimpanzee taught American Sign Language; he concludes that this represents true language learning. (SP)

Presents study which explored metalinguistic abilities of prelingually deaf children who are users of Signed English with regard to their explicit segmentation of Signed English sentences into words. Subjects exhibited varying abilities that increased with age and were similar to developmental patterns in hearing populations. (Author/BK)

Discusses the paradigms in American Sign Language (ASL) resulting from a process called "numeral incorporation" and others in which numeral handshapes alternate to express different numerical values. Concludes that not only are the signs in the "decade" paradigm fixed units in ASL grammar, but so are all the other examples of numeral…

Briefly describes five dictionaries of the signed languages used in Australia, Mexico, Italy, New Zealand, and Thailand. (CB)

Attempts to formulate an appropriate linguistic generalization for the occurrence of inhibited periodic eyeblinking by fluent American Sign Language (ASL) signers. It is shown that signers' eyeblinks are sensitive to syntactic structure, from which intonational phrases may be derived. (19 references) (MDM)