Limited access to spoken and signed language is a worldwide phenomenon affecting deaf children. Language delay caused by impeded language acquisition has negative cascading effects on deaf children's learning and development. In the event of stymied language development, deaf students exhibit highly errored writing and commit errors unseen in the…

Language assessment is a central aspect not only of language education in the general population, but also amongst heterogeneous, low-incidence populations. One such population are immigrant deaf and hard-of-hearing learners (IDML) who are bimodal-multilingual and whose languages development often includes the spoken, written, and/or signed…

This study undertook iconicity ratings and conducted transparency experiments on Israeli Sign Language (ISL). Experiment 1 compared the iconicity ratings of 520 lexical signs of ten Deaf ISL signers and thirteen hearing non-signers. Ratings were found to be affected by language knowledge, lexical class, and type of iconic mapping, as well as by…

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…

In recent years, normed signed language assessments have become a useful tool for researchers, practitioners, and advocates. Nevertheless, there are limitations in their application, particularly for the diagnosis of language disorders, and learning disabilities. Here, we discuss some of the available normed, signed language assessments and some…

"Communication Interventions with Deaf People" concerns the application of spoken, signed, and written language interventions with deaf and hard of hearing children, young people, and adults. Exploring the work that speech and language therapists, pathologists, deaf language specialists, and other professionals carry out with deaf…

The question "What's it like to be deaf?" has engendered debates on whether deafness should be considered a "loss," a "gain," or both. It is doubtful that many scholars would agree that an adequate answer entails only a depiction of the degree of hearing acuity or loss, perhaps in conjunction with age at onset,…

The quality of sign language interpreting (SLI) is a gripping construct among practitioners, educators and researchers, calling for reliable and valid assessment. There has been a diverse array of methods in the extant literature to measure SLI quality, ranging from traditional error analysis to recent rubric scoring. In this study, we want to…

A "heritage language" is defined as a minority language that differs from the dominant language used in a particular community. Codas (children of Deaf adults) who sign but may be dominant in the spoken language of their community present an interesting case due to the added difference of a spoken/signed modality in their linguistic…

Guided by Tinto's (1975) model of student retention or departure, this phenomenological study explored academic experiences of students who are deaf at the University of Education, Winneba (UEW), Ghana. Fourteen deaf students were purposively sampled from a population of 36 students. Data were gathered through a semi-structured interview. Data…

Legal and court interpreters require advanced professional skills to perform their demanding tasks. How well does Australia prepare interpreters to fulfil the linguistic needs of its numerous communities, including 'established' migrant, indigenous, 'new and emerging' and deaf, in a variety of legal settings? Based on the online data and…

New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) became an official language (NZSL Act 2006) when its vitality was already under pressure. Even though its institutional status has improved recently, the traditional community domains of NZSL use and transmission are apparently shrinking inasmuch as most of the deaf children who have cochlear implants are acquiring…

Using from the second National Longitudinal Transition Study (Newman et al., 2011), the authors investigated longitudinal patterns of educational accommodations use in secondary and, later, postsecondary settings by students who are d/Deaf or hard of hearing (SDHH). The study focused on language and communication (LC) accommodations used primarily…

Research evaluating augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) options shows general support for various strategies (e.g., manual sign, picture exchange) in teaching individuals with autism (ASD) and intellectual disabilities (ID) to request basic wants and needs. However, the overall quality and quantity of research is diluted by the…

Perception of the human body appears to involve predictive simulations that project forward to track unfolding body-motion events. Here we use representational momentum (RM) to investigate whether implicit knowledge of a learned arbitrary system of body movement such as sign language influences this prediction process, and how this compares to…