BILINGUALISM AND IDENTITY IN DEAF COMMUNITIES. Melanie Metzger (Ed.). Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2000. Pp. xii + 317. $55.00 cloth.

2002 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 497-497
Author(s):  
Christine Monikowski
Keyword(s):  
American Sign Language ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Deaf Child ◽  
Deaf Children ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Deaf People ◽  
Deaf Community ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
Linguistic Rights

In this volume of the Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities series, Metzger has edited 11 diverse topics addressing two themes: the perception of Deaf people and Deaf communities, and bilingualism. Deaf people's perception of themselves and their community is explored by authors who discuss an excellent array of topics, ranging from “miracle cures” for Deaf children in Mexico to the nature of name signs in the New Zealand Deaf community; from the linguistic rights of Deaf people in the European Union to a search for the roots of the Nicaraguan Deaf community; from a semiotic analysis of Argentine Sign Language to an analysis of how a Deaf child (American Sign Language) and his hearing family (English) make sense of each other's world views.

Multimedia Dictionary and Synthesis of Sign Language

2011 ◽  
pp. 268-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franc Solina ◽  
Slavko Krapez ◽  
Ales Jaklic ◽  
Vito Komac
Keyword(s):  
American Sign Language ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
The United States ◽  
Written Language ◽  
Deaf Children ◽  
Deaf People ◽  
Sign Languages ◽  
Proper Nouns ◽  
Basic Meaning ◽  
The World

Deaf people, as a marginal community, may have severe problems in communicating with hearing people. Usually, they have a lot of problems even with such—for hearing people—simple tasks as understanding the written language. However, deaf people are very skilled in using a sign language, which is their native language. A sign language is a set of signs or hand gestures. A gesture in a sign language equals a word in a written language. Similarly, a sentence in a written language equals a sequence of gestures in a sign language. In the distant past deaf people were discriminated and believed to be incapable of learning and thinking independently. Only after the year 1500 were the first attempts made to educate deaf children. An important breakthrough was the realization that hearing is not a prerequisite for understanding ideas. One of the most important early educators of the deaf and the first promoter of sign language was Charles Michel De L’Epée (1712-1789) in France. He founded the fist public school for deaf people. His teachings about sign language quickly spread all over the world. Like spoken languages, different sign languages and dialects evolved around the world. According to the National Association of the Deaf, the American Sign Language (ASL) is the third most frequently used language in the United States, after English and Spanish. ASL has more than 4,400 distinct signs. The Slovenian sign language (SSL), which is used in Slovenia and also serves as a case study sign language in this chapter, contains approximately 4,000 different gestures for common words. Signs require one or both hands for signing. Facial expressions which accompany signing are also important since they can modify the basic meaning of a hand gesture. To communicate proper nouns and obscure words, sign languages employ finger spelling. Since the majority of signing is with full words, signed conversation can proceed with the same pace as spoken conversation.

What We Can Learn From Hearing Parents of Deaf Children

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Flaherty
Keyword(s):  
Sign Language ◽  
Deaf Child ◽  
Deaf Education ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Deaf Children ◽  
Deaf Community ◽  
Life Stages ◽  
Hearing Parents ◽  
Language Technologies ◽  
Depth Interviews

Hearing parents of deaf children face stresses and demands related to parenting a deaf child, including difficult choices about language, technologies, education and identity for their children (Marschark, 1997). To date, few researchers have discussed the unique challenges faced by this group. Through a series of semistructured, in-depth interviews with 18 parents, this study investigated the experiences of hearing parents of deaf children spanning various life stages. A phenomenological approach identified 5 themes most pertinent to understanding their experiences. Each theme offers insight, particularly for professionals, into the distinctive issues that might arise at the time of diagnosis of deafness and reveals the challenges hearing parents face when confronted with a barrage of decisions, including choice of oral or sign language, mainstream or special deaf education, and identity with the hearing or Deaf community. The central message from this work is to inform hearing parents of deaf children and professionals working with these parents of the likely challenges that they may face.

scholarly journals Listen and Speak: Power-Knowledge-Truth and Cochlear Implants in Toronto

2015 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracey Edelist
Keyword(s):  
Cochlear Implant ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Cochlear Implants ◽  
Opportunity To Learn ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Deaf Children ◽  
Deaf People ◽  
Deaf Community ◽  
Auditory Verbal Therapy ◽  
Insight Into

<span>Cochlear implants and auditory-verbal therapy are the latest techniques and technologies used to make deaf people learn to listen and speak. This paper provides a genealogical analysis of the Cochlear Implant Program at SickKids Hospital in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and shows how this program exemplifies the medicalization of deafness while denying deaf children the opportunity to learn sign language. Using Foucault's concept of governmentality, the relations between power, knowledge, truth and their influences on the program's practices are revealed in order to provide insight into Canadian society's conceptions of deafness. This analysis reveals the Cochlear Implant Program as a capitalist establishment that is supported by unquestioned reverence of modern medicine and technology, oriented by a quest for normalcy. The paper concludes by encouraging members of the Deaf community and their supporters to challenge the hegemony of normalcy by utilizing alternate research-based knowledge-truths of cochlear implants and sign language.</span>

A functional approach to self-points and self-reference in a deaf signing child and the (dis)continuity issue in child language

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-140
Author(s):  
Stéphanie Caët ◽  
Fanny Limousin ◽  
Aliyah Morgenstern
Keyword(s):  
American Sign Language ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Deaf Child ◽  
Deaf Children ◽  
Language Abilities ◽  
Complex Syntax ◽  
Hearing Children ◽  
Reversal Errors ◽  
Self Reference

Abstract Based on her observation of two deaf children acquiring American Sign Language (ASL) who stopped pointing to persons at around 12 months and then produced reversal errors, Petitto (1987) argued that the discontinuous development of gestures and signs gives support to the hypothesis that language does not arise from general cognitive processes. However, since then, a large amount of studies on hearing children have suggested that early pointing was strongly related to later language abilities. In this paper, we follow up on these socio-cognitive approaches, with a dataset comparable to Petitto’s. We study the development of pointing and self-reference in a deaf child acquiring French Sign Language (LSF). We focus on self-reference rather than self-points, and suggest that, despite the apparent discontinuity in the production of self-points, there is continuity in the establishment of self-reference. In our data, the child produces self-points early on. She then uses predicates without overt subject before entering more complex syntax by combining predicates and self-points. The deaf signing child constructs self-reference similarly to speaking children and uses specific forms provided by her linguistic environment according to her cognitive, social and linguistic development.

scholarly journals Negotiating legitimacy in American Sign Language interpreting education: Uneasy belonging in a community of practice

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michele Friedner
Keyword(s):  
American Sign Language ◽  
Community Of Practice ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Deaf People ◽  
Deaf Community ◽  
American Sign ◽  
Relational Work ◽  
Gate Keeping ◽  
Sign Language Interpreting

This article ethnographically explores how American Sign Language-English interpreting students negotiate and foreground different kinds of relationships to claim legitimacy in relation to deaf people and the deaf community. As the field of interpreting is undergoing shifts from community interpreting to professionalization, interpreting students endeavor to legitimize their involvement in the field. Students create distinction between themselves and other students through relational work that involves positive and negative interpretation of kinship terms. In analyzing interpreting students' gate-keeping practices, this article explores the categories and definitions used by interpreting students and argues that there is category trouble that occurs. Identity and kinship categories are not nuanced or critically interrogated, resulting in deaf people and interpreters being represented in static ways.

scholarly journals “From White Deaf People’s Adversity to Black Deaf Gain”: A Proposal for a New Lens of Black Deaf Educational History

JCSCORE ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-99
Author(s):  
Rezenet Tsegay Moges
Keyword(s):  
American Sign Language ◽  
Ethnic Group ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Educational System ◽  
Deaf People ◽  
Deaf Community ◽  
American Sign ◽  
Educational History ◽  
Black Deaf ◽  
Deaf History

This paper re-visits Bauman and Murray’s (2014) “Deaf Gain,” using the perspectives of Black Deaf history.  Due to the enforcement of the Oral policy in U.S. educational system during 1890s through 1960s, the language transmission of American Sign Language (ASL) for many generations of White Deaf people were fractured (Gannon, 1981).  During the segregation, approximately 81.25% of the Black Deaf schools maintained their signed education, which ironically provided better education than the White-only schools.  Consequently, the language variation of Black Deaf people in the South, called as “Black ASL” (McCaskill et al., 2011), flourished due to the historical adversity of White Deaf experience.  Thus, the sustainability of Black ASL empowered this ethnic group of American Deaf community, which I am re-framing to what I call “Black Deaf Gain” and presenting a different objective of the ontology of Black Deaf experience.

The Development of American Sign Language–Based Analogical Reasoning in Signing Deaf Children

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-105
Author(s):  
Jon Henner ◽  
Rama Novogrodsky ◽  
Catherine Caldwell-Harris ◽  
Robert Hoffmeister
Keyword(s):  
American Sign Language ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Analogical Reasoning ◽  
Developmental Trajectory ◽  
Home Language ◽  
Deaf Children ◽  
Chronological Age ◽  
American Sign ◽  
Reasoning Abilities ◽  
Development Of Language

Purpose This article examines whether syntactic and vocabulary abilities in American Sign Language (ASL) facilitate 6 categories of language-based analogical reasoning. Method Data for this study were collected from 267 deaf participants, aged 7;6 (years;months) to 18;5. The data were collected from an ongoing study initially funded by the U.S. Institute of Education Sciences in 2010. The participants were given assessments of ASL vocabulary and syntax knowledge and a task of language-based analogies presented in ASL. The data were analyzed using mixed-effects linear modeling to first see how language-based analogical reasoning developed in deaf children and then to see how ASL knowledge influenced this developmental trajectory. Results Signing deaf children were shown to demonstrate language-based reasoning abilities in ASL consistent with both chronological age and home language environment. Notably, when ASL vocabulary and syntax abilities were statistically taken into account, these were more important in fostering the development of language-based analogical reasoning abilities than were chronological age and home language. We further showed that ASL vocabulary ability and ASL syntactic knowledge made different contributions to different analogical reasoning subconstructs. Conclusions ASL is a viable language that supports the development of language-based analogical reasoning abilities in deaf children.

scholarly journals Deaf Ni-Vanuatu and their signs: A sociolinguistic study

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jacqueline Iseli
Keyword(s):  
Data Collection ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Deaf People ◽  
Deaf Community ◽  
Sign Languages ◽  
Individual Variations ◽  
Field Methodology ◽  
Degree Of Similarity ◽  
Similarity Of Signs

<p>This thesis provides the first documentation and description of the signs created and used by deaf individuals in Vanuatu. The specific aims of this research were as follows: to establish the sociolinguistic context experienced by deaf people in Vanuatu; to identify the repertoire and characteristics of signs used by the deaf participants; to compare features of participants’ individual signs with the characteristics of home signs and emerging sign languages; and to consider the degree of similarity and potential similarity of signs between participants and how this reflects individuals’ opportunities for contact with other deaf people and signing interlocutors. The limitations of this study are that field methodology for data collection was developed in situ as conditions allowed. The sociolinguistic context for deaf Ni-Vanuatu confirms that language isolation leads to marginalisation from community and society. The study established that these home sign lexicons were limited in quantity and conceptual range, and that shared background knowledge was essential for comprehension. Overall, 22 handshapes were documented, and the predominant handshapes unmarked. Most participants preferred handling strategy for depicting signs. Some evidence of noun-verb distinction was noted in the repertoire of some participants. However, across this range of formational characteristics, results showed significant individual variations. Furthermore, multiple barriers have precluded development of a shared sign language and any form of deaf community.</p>

scholarly journals The impact of vlogging on deaf culture, communication and identity

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen S. Hibbard
Keyword(s):  
American Sign Language ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Asynchronous Communication ◽  
Deaf Culture ◽  
Spatial Modulation ◽  
Online Video ◽  
Deaf People ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Culture And Communication

This thesis presents a framework representing research conducted to examine the impact of website based online video technology for Deaf people, their culture, and their communication. This technology enables American Sign Language (ASL) asynchronous communication, called vlogging, for Deaf people. The thesis provides new insights and implications for Deaf culture and communication as a result of studying the practices, opinions and attitudes of vlogging. Typical asynchronous communication media such as blogs, books, e-mails, or movies have been dependent on use of spoken language or text, not incorporating sign language content. Online video and website technologies make it possible for Deaf people to share signed content through video blogs (vlogs), and to have a permanent record of that content. Signed content is typically 3-D, shared during face-to-face gatherings, and ephemeral in nature. Websites are typically textual and video display is 2-D, placing constraints on the spatial modulation required for ASL communication. There have been few academic studies to date examining signed asynchronous communication use by Deaf people and the implications for Deaf culture and communication. In this research, 130 vlogs by Deaf vloggers on the mainstream website YouTube, and specialized website Deafvideo.TV were examined to discover strategies employed by Deaf users as a result of the technology’s spatial limitations, and to explore similarities and differences between the two websites. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 26 Deaf people as follow up. The main findings from this research include register of vlogging formality depending on website type, informal on Deafvideo.TV while formal on YouTube. In addition, vlogs had flaming behaviour while unexpected findings of lack of ASL literature and use of technical elements that obscured ASL content in vlogs. Questions regarding the space changes and narrative elements observed have arisen, providing avenues for additional research. This study and more research could lead to a fuller understanding the impact of vlogging and vlogging technology on Deaf culture and identify potential improvements or new services that could offered.

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