Ambiguity in group discussions as a resource for communication is studied. How students, aged 13-15 years, elaborate on the concept energy through dialogue is described. Group interviews were conducted with 15 hearing and 20 deaf students. Three probes were used to initiate discussions on different meanings of energy. The results show that the…

In a Flemish case study, deaf role models revealed a moment of awakening, indicated by the Flemish sign WAKE-UP. Contact with deaf cultural rhetoric made them "wake up," and deconstruct and reconstruct their lives, a process represented by a "circle of deaf empowerment." Flemish deaf leaders mentioned acquiring this rhetoric…

In this article I analyze two cases that are the result of parents' complaints against education authorities for alleged indirect discrimination on the basis of their child's lack of access to instruction through Auslan in regular school settings. Although bilingual/bicultural programs for deaf students in Australia are available in some special…

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…

This paper presents a new strategy to be implemented in Bulgarian schools in teaching physics and astronomy to students with impaired hearing at grades 7 (13-year-old students) and 8 (14-year-old students). The strategy provides effective education for students with hearing disabilities in mainstream schools as well as for those attending…

The study investigated the effect of object preference on the learning of signs by 12 severely and profoundly retarded children (4-7 years old). Signs were chosen that were two-handed, symmetrical, and abstract. Training of each sign consisted of 10 individual training sessions using operant techniques. Results revealed no differences in the…

The study examines the communicative interaction process between two profoundly deaf mothers and their profoundly deaf young children who use American Sign Language (ASL) to communicate. The hypothesis is explored that deaf mothers modify their language when directly addressing their children in the same fashion as hearing mothers. Utterances…

The report describes activities and accomplishments of a project examining facilitative effects of manual signs on oral language comprehension of communication disordered but normal hearing students. The initial section details background and pre-grant studies leading up to the project effort. Studies touched upon such aspects as presentation…

Following a discussion of the role of classifiers (i.e., verbs of motion and location) in American Sign Language, this manual presents a six-unit program designed to teach students to produce sentences with classifiers. First, an overview is provided of the hierarchy of verbs of motion and location produced when the resources of the body are…

Compared 13 deaf adolescents with deaf parents and 13 deaf adolescents with hearing parents on the Test of English As a Foreign Language. Results are discussed in terms of implications for teaching strategies for deaf children. (DP)

The author discusses the deaf subculture describing six characteristics which illustrate its existence, pointing out the significance of sign language to the deaf, and identifying four subgroups of the culture which are determined by the circumstances under which sign language was learned. (LS)

The booklet contains illustrations of 100 basic signs for use by school employees in working with the deaf. The signs were chosen for inclusion in the booklet by a committee which reviewed hundreds of signs and evaluated their importance in communicating with the deaf. The illustrations, taken in large part from the "Preferred Signs for…

The syntax of lexical units, or signs, of American Sign Language (ASL) is analyzed. Previous areas of study concerning pauses, functional sentence perspective, theme and rheme, and topic and comment are discussed. A model is offered to depict topic-comment relationships in ASL using space, vectors, and relationship rules. (SW)

An analysis of the pauses (holds) in a passage in American Sign Language reveals that sequences of signs are interspersed with holds of different lengths. Long holds appear to indicate the ends of sentences; shorter holds, the break between two conjoined sentences; and the shortest holds, breaks between internal constituents. (Author/MV)