This study investigated the ability of two groups of profoundly deaf students (N=40 and ages 8, 11, 14, and 17), using either oral or signed communication, to employ pragmatic skills required for effective face-to-face interactions. Notable differences in pragmatic skills were found between the groups and between deaf and normal hearing students.…

A study involving 33 teachers and 732 college students with deafness found a moderate relation between students' perceptions of communication ease and teaching effectiveness and a weak relation of these two variables to the teachers' assessed level of sign skill. Students could clearly differentiate three levels of teacher sign skill. (Contains…

Describes a special class to train deaf students of all ages in ways to work with their interpreters in mainstream school settings. The class uses explanation, role play, and questions to clarify the roles of the teacher and the interpreter and to stress the importance of flexibility in the mainstream. (DB)

Presents two probe recognition experiments investigating whether overt and null pronouns in American Sign Language (ASL) similarly reactivate their referents during online sentence comprehension. Both experiments indicated that an important link exists between spatial verb agreement and the ASL pronomial system and that nonreferent inhibition does…

Eighty-seven Finnish preschoolers with deafness and hearing family members learned sign language in a 5-year project. Once weekly, children met with a teacher with deafness. Families met monthly to study sign language and all families signed together twice yearly. Families indicated they learned to sign and their social network expanded. (Contains…

This article discusses using sign language to help students with learning disabilities remember sight words. It describes the rationale for using sign language, gives directions for playing a game called Sign-o (similar to the game Bingo), provides extension activities, and includes a game board ready for duplication. (Contains references.)…

A reading program utilizing five components (a shortcut to phonemic awareness, Adapted Dolch words, Bridge lists and the Bridging process, reading comprehension, and American Sign Language development/language experience stories) resulted in dramatic gains in the reading levels of 48 elementary students at a residential school for the deaf.…

Children with profound deafness are at risk for serious reading difficulties. Multiple factors affect their development of reading skills, including use of cochlear implants. Further, multiple factors influence the overall success that children experience with their cochlear implants. These factors include the age at which they receive an implant,…

The ''ba, ba, ba'' sound universal to babies' babbling around 7 months captures scientific attention because it provides insights into the mechanisms underlying language acquisition and vestiges of its evolutionary origins. Yet the prevailing mystery is what is the biological basis of babbling, with one hypothesis being that it is a non-linguistic…

The purpose of this article is to analyze the results of a study of the development of analogical reasoning in deaf children coming from two different linguistic environments (deaf children of deaf parents--sign language, deaf children of hearing parents--spoken language) and in hearing children, as well as to compare two groups of deaf children…

This paper provides a brief review of the history of deaf education in Australia, Australian Sign Language (Auslan), and Auslan interpreting. A panel of Australian deaf university students from diverse linguistic and educational backgrounds provides insights into their perceptions of sign language interpreting provision in university lectures.…

"Theory of mind" development is now an important research field in deaf studies. Past research with the classic false belief task has consistently reported a delay in theory of mind development in deaf children born of hearing parents, while performance of second-generation deaf children is more problematic with some contradictory results. The…

Many students who are deaf or hard-of-hearing are eligible for a signing accommodation for state and other standardized tests. The signing accommodation, however, presents several challenges for testing programs that attempt to administer tests under standardized conditions. One potential solution for many of these challenges is the use of…

A study was conducted to determine post-secondary coaches' perceptions of American Sign Language (ASL) and the level of involvement with ASL when coaching post-secondary athletes who are deaf and hard of hearing. Seventy-three hearing coaches of post-secondary athletes who were deaf and hard of hearing and twenty-two post-secondary athletes who…

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…