It is approaching a half century since Bill Stokoe published his revolutionary monograph, "Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication Systems of the American Deaf." It is rare for a work of innovative scholarship to spark a social as well as an intellectual revolution, but that is just what Stokoe's 1960 paper did. And it is…

Alexander Graham Bell is often portrayed as either hero or villain of deaf individuals and the Deaf community. His writings, however, indicate that he was neither, and was not as clearly definite in his beliefs about language as is often supposed. The following two articles, reprinted from The Educator (1898), Vol. V, pp. 3?4 and pp. 38?44,…

Every so often there are stories that take the world by storm and make such an impact that they become part of our everyday world. These stories, characters, and themes become established elements of cultural literacy. This is exactly what has happened with J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. Harry and his cohort of wizards, witches, and their…

In recent years, research has progressed steadily in regard to the use of computers to recognize and render sign language. This paper reviews significant projects in the field beginning with finger-spelling hands such as "Ralph" (robotics), CyberGloves (virtual reality sensors to capture isolated and continuous signs), camera-based…

Paintings emerge from a culture field and must be interpreted in relation to the net of culture. A given culture will be implicated by the sign system used by the painter. Everyone agrees that in Chinese landscape paintings, the most important cultural bond is to ancient Chinese Taoism, and to a lesser degree, to Confucianism. Obviously, then, the…

This study focuses on the mapping of events onto verb-argument structures in British Sign Language (BSL). The development of complex sentences in BSL is described in a group of 30 children, aged 3;2-12;0, using data from comprehension measures and elicited sentence production. The findings support two interpretations: firstly, in the mapping of…

In this article the linguistic features of three Italian Sign Language (Lingua Italiana dei Segni, or LIS) registers are analyzed focusing on iconic phenomena. Previous treatments of iconicity and motivation in spoken and signed language are discussed. Iconicity is defined as a regular mapping between expressive form and meaning that can be active…

Roy J. Stewart made two very significant contributions to Deaf America. He was a key member of a Gallaudet alumni committee (along with Harley D. Drake, class of 1904, and Frederick H. Hughes, class of 1913) that raised seed money for the construction of the Edward Miner Gallaudet Memorial Library, which was influential in Gallaudet's attaining…

Learning is better than knowing, generalization is more illuminating than abstract generality or universality because we perceive and thus become conscious of change or development only. Signs and representations establish the dialectic of fixation on the one hand and transformation on the other, which is so essential to learning and cognition.…

A total of 1,018 signs in one deaf child's naturalistic interaction with her deaf mother, between the ages of 19 and 24 months were analyzed. This study summarizes regular modification processes in the phonology of the child sign's handshape, location, movement, and prosody. First, changes to signs were explained by the notion of phonological…

The study assessed the effects of near-verbatim captioning versus edited captioning on a comprehension task performed by 15 children, ages 7-11 years, who were deaf or hard of hearing. The children's animated television series "Arthur" was chosen as the content for the study. The researchers began the data collection procedure by asking…

In the past, much discrimination against deaf people was based on the assumption that they were in fact people without language--that is, dumb. "Dumb" carried the sense of being not only mute but also stupid, as in a "dumb" animal. The status of deaf people has changed in important ways, as deaf activists and scholars have reshaped the idea of…

The purpose of this study was to determine the nature and efficiency of the strategies used by prelingually deafened native signers for the temporary retention of written words with reference to a primary language-coding hypothesis (M. A. Shand, 1982). For the gathering of the data, participants were shown lists of serially presented written…

HIV/AIDS knowledge and health-related attitudes and behaviors among deaf and hearing adolescents in southern Brazil are described. Forty-two deaf students attending a special nonresidential public school for the deaf and 50 hearing students attending a regular public school, ages 15-21 years, answered a computer-assisted questionnaire. (There was…

Evidence-based practice (EBP) refers to clinical decisions as a result of the careful integration of research evidence and student needs. Legal mandates such as No Child Left Behind require teachers to employ evidence-based practices in their classrooms, yet teachers receive little guidance regarding how to determine which practices are…