Students who are deaf and use sign language frequently have language delays that affect their literacy skills. Students who use American Sign Language (ASL) often lack fluent language models in both the home and school settings, delaying both the development of a first language and the development of literacy in printed English. Mediated and scaffolded instruction presented by a More Knowledgeable Other (MKO; Vygotsky, 1978, 1994) may facilitate acquisition of a first foundational language. Repeated viewings of fluent ASL models on DVDs paired with adult mediation has resulted in increases in vocabulary skills for DHH students who used ASL (Cannon, Fredrick, & Easterbrooks, 2010; Golos, 2010; Mueller & Hurtig, 2010). Classifiers are a syntactic sub-category of ASL vocabulary that provides a critical link between ASL and the meaning of English phrases. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of teacher-mediated repeated viewings of ASL stories on DHH students’ classifier production during narrative retells. This study included 10 student participants in second, third, and fourth grades and three teacher participants from an urban day school for students who are DHH. The researcher used a multiple baseline across participants design followed by visual analysis and calculation of the percentage of non-overlapping data (PND; Scruggs, Mastropieri, & Casto, 1987) to examine the effects of the intervention. All students increased their classifier production during narrative retells following a combination of teacher mediation paired with repeated viewings of ASL models.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Nevada, Reno, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. Online version available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2010. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed Feb. 18, 2010). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 100-110).

Thesis (Ed. D.)--West Virginia University, 2009. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 137 p. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 117-128).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 112-139).

Hearing children whose parents are deaf live between two linguistic and cultural communities. As in other bilingual families, parents and children make choices in their home language use that influence the children’s competence in the minority language--ASL--and language maintenance across generations. This dissertation presents 13ethnographic interviews of hearing adults with deaf parents and case studies of three families, two with two deaf parents and three hearing sons (ages 3-16) and one with a deaf mother and her hearing 2-year-old daughter. Analysis of the adult interviews reveals that--despite variation in community affiliation and sign language ability and practice--these adult children of deaf parents share a functional language ideology in which family communication potentially involves effort; putting in such effort is appropriate only to the degree that it overcomes communication barriers. Analysis of the family members’ code choices in two hours of videotaped naturalistic interaction at home was supplemented by observation and interviews. The families’ children behaved in a manner consistent with the interviewed adults’ functional language ideology, restricting their signing to times of communicative necessity. Using an analytical framework based on Bell’s (1984; 2000) theory of audience design, I coded every communicative turn for the role of each family member (speaker/signer, addressee, participant, bystander) and for the communication medium (sign, gesture, mouthing, speech, etc.). The children consistently adjusted their code choices to their addressees, occasionally signing to their siblings, but always for an obvious purpose, e.g., keeping a secret. Only the oldest brother in each family showed any tendency to accompany speech to a sibling with signing when a deaf parent was an unaddressed participant. Between these fluent bilingual children, signing was available as a communicative resource but never the default option. Given that the hearing children even in these culturally Deaf families tended toward speech whenever communicatively possible, it is no surprise that children whose deaf parents have strong skills in spoken English might grow up with limited signing skills--as did some of the interviewed adults--and therefore restricted access to membership in the Deaf community. / text

This research represents an initial attempt at a linguistic analysis of the grammar of Egyptian Sign Language (LIM). The paper addresses verbal agreement, negation, and aspectual marking in LIM and frames these grammatical features in a typological context. Particular attention is paid to the class of directional verbs, which spatially inflect to agree with their arguments, and the sub-class of backward directional verbs. The agreement structures of these verbs, as well as suppletive imperative verbal forms, generally pattern with directional verbs in other signed languages; this paper analyzes apparent exceptions in relation to similar irregularities in other signed languages. There is an unusually large inventory of negative-marking strategies and an average-sized set of aspectual markers in LIM. Among them are crosslinguistically uncommon patterns such as frustrative (non-success/non-achievement) aspectual marking, a negative imperative, and possibly also morphological negation via either handshape change or palm-orientation reversal. The analyses and questions presented here lay the groundwork for future research in LIM and other signed languages. / text

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<p>The communication barriers between deaf and hearing society mean that interaction between these communities is kept to a minimum. The South African Sign Language research group, Integration of Signed and Verbal Communication: South African Sign Language Recognition and Animation (SASL), at the University of the Western Cape aims to create technologies to bridge the communication gap. In this thesis we address the subject of whole hand gesture recognition. We demonstrate a method to identify South African Sign Language classifiers using an eigenvector ap- proach. The classifiers researched within this thesis are based on those outlined by the Thibologa Sign Language Institute for SASL. Gesture recognition is achieved in real- time. Utilising a pre-processing method for image registration we are able to increase the recognition rates for the eigenvector approach.</p>

Sign language interpreters (SLI) provide a vital service to the deaf community but also experience high levels of pain and suffer from career threatening musculoskeletal disorders. Balancing work and rest (recovery) may be a useful intervention to help address these concerns. This thesis addresses two specific questions, parsed out of a larger study seeking to determine ideal work to rest ratios for sign language interpreting. The aims of this specific body of work were to evaluate sign language interpreters (SLIs) perceptions of the mental and physical demands associated with different work to rest ratios; and, to measure kinematics during signing, comparing kinematic outcomes between novice and experienced SLIs and over time using the work to rest ratio that was perceived as the least demanding (as identified in aim 1). Nine novice and nine experienced interpreters participated in the study, each interpreting the same ten hours of a university level lecture, over the course of six visits to the laboratory. During each session interpreters worked (“hands in the air”) for 60 minutes, but used a different work to rest strategy in each session. These strategies ranged from 10-minute work, 10-minute rest, to 60 minutes of continuous work with no rest. During each session, participants were instrumented with motion capture and electromyography sensors while interpreting in a simulated working environment. In addition, SLIs were asked to provide feedback about their perceptions of the mental and physical demands associated with each session. The first study in this thesis reports on participant’s subjective feedback about the six different sessions (paper #1); where participants identified the 15-minute work to rest ratio as ideal. The second paper reports on kinematic data from this perceived ideal work to rest ratio (paper #2). Despite interpreting in a work to rest ratio that SLIs perceived as ideal, kinematic variables with known associations to injury risk (joint position, velocity, micro-breaks) readily exceeded reported thresholds. / Thesis (Master, Kinesiology & Health Studies) -- Queen's University, 2014-05-29 17:46:11.133