The quality of interpretations produced by sign language interpreters was investigated. Twenty-five experienced interpreters were instructed to interpret narratives from (a) spoken Dutch to Sign Language of the Netherlands (SLN), (b) spoken Dutch to Sign Supported Dutch (SSD), and (c) SLN to spoken Dutch. The quality of the interpreted narratives…

The work presented here considers some linguistic methods used in sign anthropomorphism. We find a cline of signed anthropomorphism that depends on a number of factors, including the skills and intention of the signer, the animacy of the entities represented, the form of their bodies, and the form of vocabulary signs referring to those entities.…

The emergence of a new sign language since the late 1970s in Nicaragua enables us to capture the effects of successive cohorts of learners on an emerging grammar and to observe how elements are reshaped from one form and function to another. Here we document the contrastive use of a device that has been found to be central to the grammars of sign…

The purpose of this investigation is to examine the effects of singing and non-singing experiences when students develop harmonic listening skills. Participants were children and adolescents who participate in a community youth choir (N = 21). Ages ranged from 9-16 years. The subjects were organized into four separate groups. All subjects attended…

We describe the literacy issues facing young deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) learners in Taiwan who are learning both a logographic and an alphabetic script. We describe the contextual factors that surround their reading and writing processes such as island demographics, reading achievement levels, and background language learning variables…

This article draws on data from the 2006 Australian census to explore the education and employment outcomes of sign languages users living in Victoria, Australia, and to compare them with outcomes reported in the general population. Census data have the advantage of sampling the entire population on the one night, avoiding problems of population…

The present study was designed to compare the effectiveness and efficiency of two discrete trial teaching procedures for teaching receptive language skills to children with autism. While verbal instructions were delivered alone during the first procedure, all verbal instructions were combined with simple gestures and/or signs during the second…

Mongolian Sign Language (MSL) is a visual-gestural language that developed from multiple languages interacting as a result of both geographic proximity and political relations and of the natural development of a communication system by deaf community members. Similar to the phonological systems of other signed languages, MSL combines handshapes,…

Information and research on Mongolian Sign Language is scant. To date, only one dictionary is available in the United States (Badnaa and Boll 1995), and even that dictionary presents only a subset of the signs employed in Mongolia. The present study describes the kinship system used in Mongolian Sign Language (MSL) based on data elicited from…

The study of Deaf epistemologies is in a nascent stage relative to, e.g., the study of feminist or African American epistemologies. It has only recently begun attracting the widespread attention it deserves. The present article addresses Deaf epistemologies as they relate to the sometimes conflicting trends in American society and education. In a…

This article explores the role of the Deaf child as peer educator. In schools where sign languages were banned, Deaf children became the educators of their Deaf peers in a number of contexts worldwide. This paper analyses how this peer education of sign language worked in context by drawing on two examples from boarding schools for the deaf in…

This case study longitudinally analyzes and describes the changes of attentional expressions in interchanges between a pair of fraternal twins, 1 deaf and 1 hearing, from the age of 10-40 months, and their Deaf family members. The video-observed attentional expressions of initiating and reestablishing interchange were grouped in 5 functional…

Despite the current need for reliable and valid test instruments in different countries in order to monitor the sign language acquisition of deaf children, very few tests are commercially available that offer strong evidence for their psychometric properties. This mirrors the current state of affairs for many sign languages, where very little…

In the present study we examined the effect of hearing status on reading vocabulary development. More specifically, we examined the change of lexical competence in children with hearing loss over grade 4-7 and the predictors of this change. Therefore, we used a multi-factor longitudinal design with multiple outcomes, measuring the reading…

Students who are deaf or hard of hearing are a low-incidence population with diverse linguistic characteristics and levels of academic achievement. This article presents findings on teacher recommendations of assessment practices for students who are deaf or hard of hearing. A total of 372 educational professionals responded to a set of three…