To date, there has not been any research conducted on the South Sudanese Deaf community and South Sudanese Sign Language (SSSL). This article presents an introductory note about both with information gained from personal observations of the authors and from online resources. It provides an insight for furthering extensive research on the newest…

There is a dearth of qualitative research concerning deaf people's experiences of participating in the Irish Sign Language (ISL) recognition movement, and this limits our ability to understand the opportunities and constraints they encountered as they negotiated their way toward the passing of the ISL Act 2017. While ISL is unique to Ireland, it…

The following article looks into the question of negative affixation in Polish Sign Language. Until today only one negative prefix and one negative suffix were recognized in Polish Sign Language. Our research investigates farther these two affixes looking into their etymologies, constraints and new examples of their use. The negative prefix…

Echo phonology was originally proposed to account for obligatory coordination of manual and mouth articulations observed in several sign languages. However, previous research into the phenomenon lacks clear criteria for which components of movement can or must be copied when the articulators are so different. Nor is there discussion of which…

Historically, fictional productions which use sign language have often begun with scripts that use the written version of a spoken language. This can be a challenge for deaf actors as they must translate the written word to a performed sign language text. Here, we explore script development in "Small World," a television comedy which…

Human languages, signed and spoken, can be characterized by the structural patterns they use to associate communicative "forms" with "meanings." One such pattern is paradigmatic morphology, where complex words are built from the systematic use "and re-use" of sub-lexical units. Here, we provide evidence of emergent…

Since its publication in 2013, the Visual Communication and Sign Language (VCSL) Checklist has been widely utilized to assess the development of early American Sign Language skills of deaf children from birth to age 5. However, little research has been published using the results of VCSL assessments. Notably, no psychometric analyses have been…

For the past 12 years I have been involved teaching music at a deaf school in Melbourne, philanthropically supported by Musica Viva's Equal Music program. The students use Auslan as their primary language and prior to the residency there had not been a music program in the school for more than a decade. Students now participate fully in the…

English vowels are phonologically and orthographically more difficult than consonants when learning to map speech to print. We sought to determine if teaching young at-risk readers and spellers to use a visual vowel hand sign system to segment spoken words into their component phonemes contributed to improved grapheme-phoneme correspondence…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to determine whether and how learning American Sign Language (ASL) is associated with spoken English skills in a sample of ASL-English bilingual deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children. Method: This cross-sectional study of vocabulary size included 56 DHH children between 8 and 60 months of age who were…

The discussion on the role of American Sign Language (ASL) in deaf students' reading development has been long and contentious. The students' limited knowledge of English has been commonly perceived as a culprit in making reading difficult. However, a more nuanced explanation of reading performance and its relationship with competence in ASL's…

This study explores Deaf individuals' and sign language interpreters' perspectives on what it is like to work together in K-12 education. A group of 41 formerly mainstreamed Deaf individuals and interpreters offers insights into interactional dynamics (e.g., the deaf student-interpreter relationship) that influence interpreters' work, deaf…

The value of experiential lab work can be measured by its ability to transform a student's self-identity related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Successful experiences help students shed notions of self-incompatibility with STEM and can often motivate a research career as they develop as a scientist. However, students…

Multiple studies have reported mathematics underachievement for students who are deaf, but the onset, scope, and causes of this phenomenon remain understudied. Early language deprivation might be one factor influencing the acquisition of numbers. In this study, we investigated a basic and fundamental mathematical skill, automatic magnitude…

There are over 135,000 deaf/hard of hearing students enrolled in postsecondary institutions in the U.S. However, deaf students who use sign language may not be aware of their sign language skills, resulting in accommodations that do not provide full access to postsecondary course content and reduced degree completion rates compared to their…