Describes research into the correspondence between speech and sign language by looking at simultaneous communication as it is used by fluent deaf persons. The study aims to determine what relationship, if any, exists between the morpheme level and the message level of utterances in discourse. (SED)

Research is reported which investigated the ability of four-month-old hearing infants to discriminate between gestures derived from American Sign Language. Findings show that infants possess the perceptual abilities to differentiate between signs that differ solely in terms of contrasts along a single underlying movement direction. (SED)

Describes an instrument for objective assessment of sign language interpreters, which used videotapes to assess the accuracy of interpreted output. It categorizes the kinds of modifications made in response to cultural factors, estimates the degree of American Sign Language or English use, and records fingerspelling influence. (Author/SED)

Describes a study that determines if an interrelationship exists between cognitive level, gestural development, and spoken English development in five hearing-impaired preschool children. Results suggest that a deaf child's cognitive development may be related to his/her communicative ability, especially in terms of pragmatic-semantic…

Examines whether, and how, deaf adults adjust their nonvocal communicative behavior when facing one of three audience types: hearing adults who have learned a signed language, deaf adults who use a signed languageand deaf children of deaf parents. (FL)

This digest provides a brief overview of American Sign Language (ASL) and discusses its study as a foreign language in U.S. schools and institutions of higher education. The following questions are addressed: (1) Is ASL a language?; (2) If ASL is used in the United States, how can it be considered a "foreign" language; (3) Are ASL users…

Chafe's theory of generative semantics, which uses spoken language for illustration, can be applied to American Sign Language in two ways: to combat the erroneous assumption that sign languages simply represent spoken language in visible form and to explain various parts of the grammar of American Sign Language. (MSE)

Differences in intelligence and achievement of 78 deaf adolescents with and without deaf family members were compared. The results indicated that the relationships of nonverbal intelligence, verbal achievement, and early sign language are more complex than was apparent in past studies. (Author/SW)

Two approaches to intervention geared to autistic children's characteristics are presented: one stressing speech and the other sign and speech. Some findings relevant to implementation of simultaneous sign and speech are discussed, and due to observed variability in processing and responsiveness to intervention, the need for individual programing…

Native users of American Sign Language manipulated sentences in four ways: sign them at slow rate, parse them, make relatedness judgments of pairs of signs taken from each sentence, and recall the sentences. Hierarchical performance structures for each of the sentences were highly similar across tasks. (Author/RD)

Differences in teachers' ability to use separate signs for English grammatical endings and the use of characteristics of American Sign Language were found. Deaf teachers deleted far fewer signs and used more elements of ASL while the inexperienced hearing teachers did the reverse. (Author/DB)

Reports research on the communicative behavior of a hearing child whose parents communicated with him, from birth, in both signs and words. The child's expressive ability accelerated in both modalities and this is possibly attributable to the addition of the signed component. (PJM)

To sensitize hearing people to the experience of deafness and to teach them methods of communicating with the hearing impaired, Rochester Institute of Technology and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf planned and delivered a program with the cooperation of merchants at an area shopping center. (SK)