We report the first study on pronoun use by an under-studied research population, children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exposed to American Sign Language from birth by their deaf parents. Personal pronouns cause difficulties for hearing children with ASD, who sometimes reverse or avoid them. Unlike speech pronouns, sign pronouns are…

Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) literature, including the reading behaviour of Deaf adults, suggests that Teachers of the deaf (TODs) read different amounts of text during read alouds to DHH prereaders based on the spoken and visual communication modes DHH prereaders use, such as: American Sign Language (ASL), only spoken English (speech),…

The earliest descriptions of Latin finger alphabets were recorded in southern Europe between 1579 and 1589. New literary and visual evidence for sixteenth-century Ottoman Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sign systems are presented and analyzed in this article.

A sociolinguistic style consists of a set of linguistic resources that carry specific meaning within a social context (Campbell-Kibler 2011). One such resource is the use of phonetic variants that do not change the denotative meaning of a word, but are different enough to be recognized as unique. This type of socially constrained phonetic…

Helping young deaf and hard of hearing children explore ASL and English is one of the important jobs with which the preschool teachers who work with those children are tasked. Learning ASL and English, the children will become bilingual, fluent in the two languages they will use throughout their lives. Working with two languages requires planning.…

Many human languages have complex grammatical machinery devoted to temporality, but very little is known about how this came about. This paper investigates how people convey temporal information when they cannot use any conventional languages they know. In a laboratory experiment, adult participants were asked to convey information about simple…

Purpose: We present the first study of echolalia in deaf, signing children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We investigate the nature and prevalence of sign echolalia in native-signing children with ASD, the relationship between sign echolalia and receptive language, and potential modality differences between sign and speech. Method: Seventeen…

The authors reviewed the literature regarding linguistic variations seen in American Sign Language. These variations are influenced by region and culture. Features of spoken languages have also influenced sign languages as they intersected, e.g., Black ASL has been influenced by African American English. A literature review was conducted to…

The purpose of this literature review is to present the arguments in support of conceptualizing deaf children as 'English Learners', to explore the educational implications of such conceptualizations, and to suggest directions for future inquiry. Three ways of interpreting the label 'English Learner' in relationship to deaf children are explored:…

This study examined the career decision-making self-efficacy (CDMSE) of deaf and typically hearing young adults and the contribution of career-related family support and expectations to this type of self-efficacy. Participants were 110 young adults: 50 deaf persons and 60 persons with typical hearing. They completed the Career Decision-Making…

In this article, we examine various strategies used to express cardinal numbers in Yucatec Maya Sign Languages (YMSLs) from three historically unrelated communities in Yucatán, Mexico: Chicán, Nohkop, and Cepeda Peraza. Our findings describe some numeral strategies, which remained unattested in previous accounts, and demonstrate that YMSL numerals…

Background: Staff may encourage individuals with intellectual disabilities to use manual signs by modelling its use, but implementing key word signing during daily activities can be demanding. Method: Staff's use of manual signs was observed in four special schools and four day centres for adults with intellectual disabilities during communicative…

Since its beginning, the education of deaf and hard of hearing individuals has been steeped in a debate around language, as professionals have clashed in a debate on whether signed or spoken language should be used as the primary language of instruction and communication with deaf and hard of hearing individuals. This has created a condition in…

Deaf people use Sign Language (SL) for intellectual development, communications and other human activities that are mediated by language--such as the expression of complex and abstract thoughts and feelings; and for literature, culture and knowledge. The Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) is a complete linguistic system of visual-spatial manner,…

This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of using visual materials in teaching vocabulary to deaf students of EFL. For this purpose, 80 deaf students from a state special education vocational high school in Turkey contributed to this study. All students had first English classes in their lives and they are at the starter level of English,…