Iconicity is a property that pervades the lexicon of many sign languages, including American Sign Language (ASL). Iconic signs exhibit a motivated, nonarbitrary mapping between the form of the sign and its meaning. We investigated whether iconicity enhances semantic priming effects for ASL and whether iconic signs are recognized more quickly than…

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,…

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…

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…

With the increase in research on multiliteracies comes greater interest in exploring multiple pathways of learning for deaf children. Educational media have been increasingly examined as a tool for facilitating the development of deaf children's language and literacy skills. The authors investigated whether preschool deaf children (N = 31)…

This study focuses on similarities and differences in the processing of written text by individuals with prelingual deafness from different reading levels that used Hebrew as their first spoken language and Israeli Sign Language as their primary manual communication mode. Data were gathered from three sources, including (a) a sentence…

Young disabled people continue to be under-represented throughout further and higher education settings. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's social theory of habitus, capital and field, this paper explores the practices of domination and oppression that have made it difficult for young people with visual impairments and hearing impairments to participate…

The present study was designed to investigate the ways in which notions of semantics and phonology are acquired by adult naive learners of American Sign Language (ASL) when they are first exposed to a set of simple signs. First, a set of ASL signs was tested for nontransparency and a set of signs was selected for subsequent use. Next, a set of…

The purpose of this study was to compare important characteristics of sign language programs in institutions of higher education in the United States in 1994 and 2004. Data were collected regarding (a) program structure, (b) program content and resources, and (c) opinions and recommendations of program administrators. Data show that sign language…

Understanding the cultural and linguistic diversity of young children with hearing loss informs the provision of assessment, habilitation, and education services to both children and their families. Data describing communication mode, oral language use, and demographic characteristics were collected for 406 children with hearing loss and their…

The authors conducted a qualitative meta-analysis of the research on assessment accommodations for students who are deaf or hard of hearing. There were 16 identified studies that analyzed the impact of factors related to student performance on academic assessments across different educational settings, content areas, and types of assessment…

The efficacy of video-based sign language (SL) navigation aids to improve Web search for Deaf Signers was tested by two experiments. Experiment 1 compared 2 navigation aids based on text hyperlinks linked to embedded SL videos, which differed in the spatial contiguity between the text hyperlink and SL video (contiguous vs. distant). Deaf Signers'…

Infants' hands are ready to construct words using sign language before their mouths are ready to speak. These research findings may explain the popularity of parents and caregivers teaching and using sign language with infants and toddlers, along with speech. The advantages of using sign language with young children go beyond the infant and…

From an ethnographic case study of a state-funded residential school for the Deaf, the authors employed Critical Discourse Analysis to identify competing discourses in the talk of educators. These discourses are embedded in the historical oppression and labeling of deaf people as disabled and the development of Deaf culture as a counter-discourse.…

This study examines Deaf parents with children who have cochlear implants on their beliefs and perspectives of bilingualism in American Sign Language and English using complementary mixed methods through surveys and follow-up interviews. Seventeen families participated in the survey and eight families continued their participation in semi-formal…