Studies have shown that iconicity can provide a benefit to non-signers during the learning of single signs, but other aspects of signed messages that might also be beneficial have received less attention. In particular, do other features of signed languages help support comprehension of a message during the process of language learning? The…

We investigated whether sign-naïve learners can infer and learn the meaning of signs after minimal exposure to continuous, naturalistic input in the form of a weather forecast in Swedish Sign Language. Participants were L1-English adults. Two experimental groups watched the forecast once (n = 40) or twice (n = 42); a control group did not (n =…

Previous studies have suggested that deafness could lead to deficits in motor skills and other body-related abilities. However, the literature regarding motor skills in deaf adults is scarce and existing studies often included participants with heterogeneous language backgrounds and deafness etiologies, thus making it difficult to delineate the…

There is a lack of tests available for assessing sign language proficiency among L2 learners. We have therefore developed a sign repetition test, SignRepL2, with a specific focus on the phonological features of signs. This paper describes the two phases of developing this test. In the first phase, content was developed in the form of 50 items with…

English vowels are phonologically and orthographically more difficult than consonants when learning to map speech to print. We sought to determine if teaching young at-risk readers and spellers to use a visual vowel hand sign system to segment spoken words into their component phonemes contributed to improved grapheme-phoneme correspondence…

Sign language is considered as the important communication means among the normal people and the deaf. Therefore, developing communication systems to help those people is an important issue. In this paper, the neutrosophic technique and fuzzy c-means are applied to detect and recognize the alphabet Arabic sign language. The proposed system starts…

Purpose: Children are assumed to acquire orthographic representations during autonomous reading by decoding new written words. The present study investigates how deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children build new orthographic representations compared to typically hearing (TH) children. Method: Twenty-nine DHH children, from 7.8 to 13.5 years old,…

Purpose: There are well-established guidelines for the recording, transcription, and analysis of spontaneous oral language samples by researchers, educators, and speech pathologists. In contrast, there is presently no consensus regarding methods for the written documentation of sign language samples. The Handshape Analysis Recording Tool (HART) is…

Past work investigating spatial cognition suggests better mental rotation abilities for those who are fluent in a signed language. However, no prior work has assessed whether fluency is needed to achieve this performance benefit or what it may look like on the neurobiological level. We conducted an electroencephalography experiment and assessed…

Bimodal bilingualism involves the use of a sign language and a spoken language, and offers a unique opportunity to explore the cognitive effects of growing up bilingual. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between bimodal bilingualism and executive function (EF) in hearing children who are native users of a sign language. We…

Purpose: The use of sign-supported speech (SSS) in the education of deaf students has been recently discussed in relation to its usefulness with deaf children using cochlear implants. To clarify the benefits of SSS for comprehension, 2 eye-tracking experiments aimed to detect the extent to which signs are actively processed in this mode of…

This article details the transcription process we developed to handle bimodal and multilingual interview data collected during our research into the teacher language awareness (TLA) of two high-quality teachers in a Swedish bilingual school for the deaf. Both teachers used a combination of spoken Swedish, spoken English, and Teckenspråk (Sweden's…

Previous research has suggested that early deaf signers differ in face processing. Which aspects of face processing are changed and the role that sign language may have played in that change are however unclear. Here, we compared face categorization (human/non-human) and human face recognition performance in early profoundly deaf signers, hearing…

The difficulties in learning skills that deaf and hard of hearing students encounter stem from morphology and syntactic morphology (morpho-syntax) and it is clear that there are limited studies related to these. In this study, it is aimed at examining hearing and deaf and hard of hearing students' morpho-syntactic actions which are compatible with…

Previous research found a beneficial effect of augmentative signs (signs from a sign language used alongside speech) on spoken word learning by signing deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children. The present study compared oral DHH children, and hearing children in a condition with babble noise in order to investigate whether prolonged experience…