Linguistic ideologies that are left unquestioned and unexplored, especially as reflected and produced in marginalized language communities, can contribute to inequality made real in decisions about languages and the people who use them. One of the primary bodies of knowledge guiding international language policy is the International Organization…

Brain imaging studies suggest that children can simultaneously develop, learn, and use two languages. A visual language, such as American Sign Language (ASL), facilitates development at the earliest possible moments in a child's life. Spoken language development can be delayed due to diagnostic evaluations, device fittings, and auditory skill…

Hearing impairment may constitute a barrier for accessing to information and communication in public places. Since the oral communication forms the basis of the learning process, this problem becomes of particular relevance at schools and universities. To cope with this situation is not enough to provide a textual translation for people with…

This study investigated visual statistical learning (VSL) in 24 deaf signers and 24 hearing non-signers. Previous research with hearing individuals suggests that SL mechanisms support literacy. Our first goal was to assess whether VSL was associated with reading ability in deaf individuals, and whether this relation was sustained by a link between…

New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) became an official language (NZSL Act 2006) when its vitality was already under pressure. Even though its institutional status has improved recently, the traditional community domains of NZSL use and transmission are apparently shrinking inasmuch as most of the deaf children who have cochlear implants are acquiring…

This article describes the experiences of some of the many families of the deaf and hard of hearing children who come to Shared Reading Saturdays at Northern Essex Community College (NECC) in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The program, which includes monthly gatherings and is coordinated by the NECC's Gallaudet University Regional Center, features deaf…

The national policy in deaf education in Mainland China primarily focuses on oral/aural instruction and hearing rehabilitation. The curriculum in primary grades is specifically structured on speech and hearing skills for language development. But there is little evidence that documents what early literacy instruction looks like or how teachers…

This article discusses the joys, rewards, and challenges of using Deaf history as a framework for teaching Deaf studies, Deaf history and culture, and American Sign Language to hearing undergraduates in a liberal arts college oriented to social justice.

In this study we explored the revision process and strategies implemented by deaf and hearing students who attend the same bilingual school context (LIS and Italian). For that we analysed and compared the types and quality of revisions made by deaf and hearing participants to their first draft of a narrative text ("Frog, Where Are You?")…

Purpose: The authors sought to investigate the influence of a comprehensive range of factors on the decision making of caregivers of children with hearing loss regarding the use of speech, the use of sign, spoken language multilingualism, and spoken language choice. This is a companion article to the qualitative investigation described in Crowe,…

We used fluency tasks to investigate lexical organisation in Deaf adults who use British sign language (BSL). The number of responses produced to semantic categories did not differ from reports in spoken languages. However, there was considerable variability in the number of responses across phonological categories, and some signers had difficulty…

The link between vocabulary and later literacy is well documented in the research base. One way children gain vocabulary is through incidental learning. Deaf or hard-of-hearing children (D/HH) often struggle with incidental learning and require vocabulary intervention to increase their lexicon. An effective vocabulary intervention is storybook…

Measures of lexical frequency presuppose the existence of corpora, but true machine-readable corpora of sign languages (SLs) are only now being created. Lexical frequency ratings for SLs are needed because there has been a heavy reliance on the interpretation of results of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experiments in the SL research…

In this article, we present a system for the representation of the configurations of the thumb in the hand configurations of signed languages and for the interactions of the thumb with the four fingers proper. The configuration of the thumb is described as a componential combination of the descriptions of thumb opposition, abduction of the CM…

This article describes British Sign Language (BSL) as a viable option for teaching science. BSL is used by a vast number of people in Britain but is seldom taught in schools or included informally alongside lessons. With its new addition of a large scientific glossary, invented to modernise the way science is taught to deaf children, BSL breaks…