Background: Spoken and gestural communication proficiency varies greatly among autistic individuals. Three studies examined the role of oral- and manual-motor skill in predicting autistic children's speech development. Methods: Study 1 investigated whether infant and toddler oral- and manual-motor skills predict middle childhood and teenage speech…

This document presents the Assessment of Deafblind Access to Manual Language Systems (ADAMLS), a resource for educational teams who are responsible for developing appropriate adaptations and strategies for children who are deafblind who are candidates for learning manual language systems. The assessment tool should be used for all children with a…

Eleven deaf children using SEE and 11 using Siglish received visually the first three narrative passages and accompanying questions in manual form from the Listening Comprehension subtest of the Durell Analysis of Reading Difficulty. Although data indicated that Ss trained in SEE were generally superior to those trained in Siglish in…

Following pre-training with everyday objects, 8 children aged from 2 to 4 years learned to produce one manual sign (fists placed one above the other, in front of body) to one stimulus and an alternative manual sign (shoulders touched with ipsilateral hands) to the other stimulus, with each of three pairs of different arbitrary wooden shapes (Set…

An examination of 20 manuals designed to teach sign communication to persons with severe communication impairment revealed over 850 words appearing in two or more manuals. These words are listed in alphabetical order with their frequency of occurrence. (Author)

Outcome measures for students enrolled in separate sections of a manual communication course taught by the same instructor were compared. One group received instruction in a traditional university classroom setting. The other group received instruction through asynchronous, videostreamed online delivery. No statistically significant differences in…

The text for a course in manual communication contains 45 lessons and 565 signs, each illustrated by a drawing indicating the shape of the hands, the place where the hands move to and from, and the movements. Practice exercises for each lesson, designed to foster progressive reinforcement of acquired vocabulary, are grouped together with…

Presents study analyzing gestural communication of hearing children between one and two years of age, comparing it with the communication of a deaf child of deaf parents exposed to sign language since birth. Results suggest that the capacity to combine symbols, referential words, or signs simultaneously depends on exposure to a linguistic input. (…

The bibliography includes 33 titles dealing with manual communication and lists sources and prices of the entries. (JM)

Reported are data obtained from a questionnaire survey of 152 deaf adults. Subjects were questioned concerning medical and audiological history, communication abilities and preferences, and educational, vocational, and social backgrounds. (Author)

To describe the procedures that teachers in classrooms using manual communication employ in order to get and maintain student attention, four secondary teachers were videotaped on three occasions over a two-week period. The use of a mixture of deaf adult signing behavior and spoken discourse markers is reported. (Author)

A training sequence is presented for teaching the manual alphabet beginning with the hand shapes that look most like the letters they represent. Each manual letter is then paired with an associated word. (CL)

The basic impoverishment of deafness is not lack of hearing but lack of language. To illustrate this, we have only to compare a 4-year-old hearing child, with a working vocabulary of between 2,000 and 3,000 words, to a child of the same age, profoundly deaf since infancy, who may have only a few words at his command. Even more important than…

Questionnaires completed by 195 teachers of deaf blind students revealed that additional handicapping conditions and the presence of undesirable behaviors had an important effect on the selection of communication methods. (CL)