A study examined 19 families' perspectives in an American Sign Language (ASL)-English early childhood bilingual classroom. Family attitudes changed due to a balanced presentation from hearing and deaf perspectives, learning that the entire family could become bilingual, encouragement to interact with the deaf community, and the presentation of ASL…

Offers hearing parents of deaf infants guidelines on communicating with their child based on changes that deaf mothers make in their signing when talking to their deaf baby. Guidelines focus on restricting language, sign repetition, dramatic expression, waiting for the child's attention, tapping to gain attention, and visual leading. (DB)

As aberrant behavior is often recognized as the number one form of communication, it becomes imperative that as parents, teachers, and educators we must address and systematically teach or provide all children with an effective means of communication. While many augmentative and alternative communication systems such as manual sign language and…

Variation in the parts of ASL signs (i.e., phonological variation) has been explained largely by reference to the influence of the preceding and the following segments. This article examines three linguistic variables in ASL: the sign deaf; the location of a class of signs represented by the verb know; and signs produced with a 1 handshape. For…

Responding to Johnston's projections for the future of Australian Sign Language (Auslan), I analyzed school enrollments in American educational programs and found similar trends. There are fewer deaf and hard of hearing children in school now than twenty years ago, with the largest decline, approximately 50 percent, among children with profound…

We present a new highly interactive computer animation tool to increase the mathematical skills of deaf children. We aim at increasing the effectiveness of (hearing) parents in teaching arithmetic to their deaf children, and the opportunity of deaf children to learn arithmetic via interactive media. Using state-of-the-art computer animation…

This study represents an attempt to determine the nature and efficiency of the strategies used by prelingually deafened individuals for the recognition of written words with reference to an orthographic self-teaching concept (D. L. Share, 1995). A research paradigm asking the participants to make categorical judgments for real words and…

Competence in written English is essential for success at work in the United States. For deaf and hard-of-hearing people, especially for those who do not use spoken language, the ability to express themselves in writing with competence assures clear communication with hearing people. However, learning how to do so presents challenges for both deaf…

This article outlines an innovative project conducted at Macquarie University, in order to instigate a change in the delivery of the Postgraduate Diploma in Auslan/English Interpreting. This is the first reported educational change project focusing on the training of sign language interpreters. The goal of the project was to research and develop a…

This report discusses an approach for the psychoeducational evaluation of students with deafness in the Francophone population of Ontario, Canada. An introduction describes the historical context of education of deaf students and presents the idea that learning a sign language, ideally while the child is very young, furnishes a foundation for…

This brief paper for individuals interested in being qualified as educational interpreters for the deaf in Virginia provides basic information about educational interpreting and competency requirements of the Virginia Quality Assurance Screening (VQAS) program. It explains: the goal of educational interpreting; the role of the educational…

An in-progress interdisciplinary research effort, Conversation Analytic (CA) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) study, is reported. A conversation analytic approach to repair and self-explication is taken that covers both human studies and artificial intelligence. The term "human" is used here in place of "linguistic." Three…

A study investigated acquisition of three independent yet simulatneously produced morphological systems in American Sign Language (ASL): the linguistic use of space, use of classifiers, and inflections for aspect, all information incorporated into the production of a sign. Subjects were 30 deaf children with severe or profound prelingual hearing…

The Minnesota Chemical Dependency Program for Hearing Impaired Youth, a joint venture of St. Mary's and Fairview Riverside Hospitals, is part of Riverside Medical Center and housed at Saint Mary's Hospital in Minneapolis. It is an 18-bed inpatient program serving hearing-impaired individuals aged 16 years and up. All staff (including such…

A study examined English grammatical characteristics used in the signing of teachers of hearing-impaired students, using a diglossic continuum between American Sign Language (ASL) and English. Scalogram analysis or implicational scaling, a traditional tool in variation theory useful for analyzing samples where there are a small number of tokens…