Impressed by Marilyn Daniels' research on the educational benefits of signing for hearing children, a New Jersey early childhood education center trained its staff in sign language as a teaching tool. Students enthusiastically incorporated sign language into their activities as they increased word recognition and vocabulary growth. (MLH)

The acquisition of movement skills in American Sign Language was examined longitudinally in young children, one deaf and eight hearing, of deaf parents. Although production accuracy did not improve over the 5 to 14 months of the study's duration, the number and complexity of movements produced by the children did increase. Contacting action was…

Studies of American Sign language including functional magnetic resonance imaging of deaf signers confirms the importance of left hemisphere structures in signed language, but also the contributions of right hemisphere regions to sign language processing. A case study involving cortical stimulation mapping in a deaf signer provides evidence for…

Sentence processing in American Sign Language (ASL) was investigated as a function of age of first language acquisition with a timed grammatical judgement task. Participants were 30 adults who were born deaf and first exposed to a fully perceptible language between the ages of birth and 13 years. Stimuli were grammatical and ungrammatical examples…

Communication Challenge Softball is a developmentally appropriate game for middle school students. The game allows them to develop new communication skills using American Sign Language (signing). Traditional softball has been a part of physical education for years, and remains a popular sport played by children in community leagues throughout the…

In this article we discuss an application that translates hand gestures of the American Sign Language (ASL) alphabet and converts them to text. The FingerSpell application addresses the communication barrier of the deaf and the hearing-impaired by eliminating the need for a third party with knowledge of the American Sign Language, allowing a user…

This article investigates the ways in which an experienced deaf teacher is able to extend the discourse in his classroom and enable his students to participate. We saw that he employs several approaches, some but not all of which depend on his native competence in ASL. Further research with other native signing teachers could lead to the…

This study investigates the relationship between theory of mind (ToM) skills in deaf children and input from their hearing mothers. Twenty-two hearing mothers and their deaf children (ages 4-10 years) participated in tasks designed to elicit talk about the mind. The mothers' mental state talk was compared with that of 26 mothers with hearing…

This paper reports a study designed to examine the neuronal correlates for comprehending the signs of American Sign Language representing numerals in deaf signers who acquired Japanese Sign Language as their first language. The participants were scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) twice on the day of the experiment. The results…

This study determines the relative difficulty and associated strategy use of arithmetic (addition and subtraction) story problems when presented in American Sign Language to primary level (K-3) deaf and hard-of-hearing students. Results showed that deaf and hard-of-hearing students may consider and respond to arithmetic story problems differently…

Despite the society's growing understanding of sign languages, particularly American Sign Language (ASL), there is still a profound limitation on the availability of literary, linguistic, historical, and other reference materials related to them because of the lack of a commonly accepted writing system. This article transcribed and analyzed a set…

This article describes the mediated American Sing Language (ASL) presentation of technical vocabulary and definitions within the context of a web-based astronomy course for first year students at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology (Rochester, NY). Deaf students showed achievement gains with fewer…

This review of the literature on hearing children of deaf parents (HCDPs) notes increasing interest in this subject, including such aspects as language development, life experiences of HCDPs, parental self-concepts, and counseling techniques. Themes in the literature are identified, including the following: (1) the frustrations of HCDPs as…

The manifestation of time, space, and person reference in American Sign Language is described and discussed. The effect of the modality of communication on the language system is studied. (Author/RM)

This manual defines basic computer terminology and presents sign language gestures for the terms. The manual uses the Atlanta Area School for the Deaf's Manually Coded English Sign Language System, a compilation of signs derived from Signing Exact English and American Sign Language; it also indicates those instances where fingerspelling is…