To address the needs and abilities of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students in different educational settings, it is important to understand who is in which setting. A secondary analysis of the National Longitudinal Transition Study 2 (NLTS2) database was conducted to examine differences in the characteristics of students who attended special…

British Sign Language has a number of regional variations. This article examines the role of residential schools in the development of sign variants. Citing data collected during interviews with members of the Lancaster and Morecambe Deaf community (who of necessity attended schools elsewhere), it explores the peer-to-peer transmission of sign…

Ethiopian Sign Language utilizes a fingerspelling system that represents Amharic orthography. Just as each character of the Amharic abugida encodes a consonant-vowel sound pair, each sign in the Ethiopian Sign Language fingerspelling system uses handshape to encode a base consonant, as well as a combination of timing, placement, and orientation to…

Research presented here describes the sign names and the customs of name allocation within the British Deaf community. While some aspects of British Sign Language sign names and British Deaf naming customs differ from those in most Western societies, there are many similarities. There are also similarities with other societies outside the more…

This paper presents a study of children's use of fingerspelling. It is part of a larger longitudinal ethnographic study of deaf children, who were 3-6 years old when the study started. They are early signers using Swedish Sign Language in communication with teachers and peers. The aim of this paper is to examine the different functions which…

This case study explores the relationship between teachers' language knowledge and their grammar teaching practices within the context of a bilingual school for the deaf in Sweden, a country that has demonstrated success in educating deaf children bilingually in written Swedish and Sweden's signed language. The study's participants were two…

Early developmental psychologists viewed iconic representation as cognitively less complex than other forms of symbolic thought. It is therefore surprising that iconic signs are not acquired more easily than arbitrary signs by young language learners. One explanation is that children younger than 3 years have difficulty interpreting iconicity. The…

A gap exists between the academic achievement of youth with hearing impairments and their peers in the general population in reading, mathematics, science, and social studies, according to a new release by The National Center for Special Education Research. This report uses data from the National Longitudinal Transition Study 2 dataset to provide…

This descriptive survey research study assessed the professional attributes of teacher preparation for teaching students with hearing impairment. It discussed the role of teaching competence in ensuring the smooth delivery of lessons to children with special needs, especially the hearing-impaired. THAQ (Teaching Hearing-impaired Assessment…

This article explains the consolidation of Brazilian Sign Language in Brazil through a linguistic plan that arose from the Brazilian Sign Language Federal Law 10.436 of April 2002 and the subsequent Federal Decree 5695 of December 2005. Two concrete facts that emerged from this existing language plan are discussed: the implementation of bilingual…

One of the ongoing challenges teachers of students who are deaf or hard of hearing face is managing the visual split attention implicit in multimedia learning. When a teacher presents various types of visual information at the same time, visual learners have no choice but to divide their attention among those materials and the teacher and…

Age of acquisition (AoA) effects have been used to support the notion of a critical period for first language acquisition. In this study, we examine AoA effects in deaf British Sign Language (BSL) users via a grammaticality judgment task. When English reading performance and nonverbal IQ are factored out, results show that accuracy of…

The purpose of this article is to investigate the potential role of parent involvement and parent expectation in postschool outcomes for individuals who are d/Deaf or hard of hearing (DHH). Students who are DHH have lower retention and employment rates than their peers. Recognizing the importance of family in developmental outcomes for all…

This article discusses Estonian personal name signs. According to study there are four personal name sign categories in Estonian Sign Language: (1) arbitrary name signs; (2) descriptive name signs; (3) initialized-descriptive name signs; (4) loan/borrowed name signs. Mostly there are represented descriptive and borrowed personal name signs among…

The purpose of the current study was to assess whether individuals with intellectual disabilities would emit untrained speaker responses (i.e., signed tacts and mands) after being taught listener behaviors. Listener relations were trained via an automated matching-to-sample (MTS) procedure. Following mastery, the emergence of signed tacts,…