Community-Engaged Needs Assessment of Deaf American Sign Language Users in Florida, 2018

2021 ◽  
pp. 003335492110267
Author(s):  
Tyler G. James ◽  
Michael M. McKee ◽  
Meagan K. Sullivan ◽  
Glenna Ashton ◽  
Stephen J. Hardy ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Health Education ◽  
Needs Assessment ◽  
American Sign Language ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Health Concern ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
American Sign ◽  
The Past ◽  
Education And Health

Objectives Deaf American Sign Language (ASL) users comprise a linguistic and cultural minority group that is understudied and underserved in health education and health care research. We examined differences in health risk behaviors, concerns, and access to health care among Deaf ASL users and hearing English speakers living in Florida. Methods We applied community-engaged research methods to develop and administer the first linguistically accessible and contextually tailored community health needs assessment to Deaf ASL users living in Florida. Deaf ASL users (n = 92) were recruited during a 3-month period in summer 2018 and compared with a subset of data on hearing English speakers from the 2018 Florida Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (n = 12 589). We explored prevalence and adjusted odds of health behavior, including substance use and health care use. Results Mental health was the top health concern among Deaf participants; 15.5% of participants screened as likely having a depressive disorder. Deaf people were 1.8 times more likely than hearing people to engage in binge drinking during the past month. In addition, 37.2% of participants reported being denied an interpreter in a medical facility in the past 12 months. Conclusion This study highlights the need to work with Deaf ASL users to develop context-specific health education and health promotion activities tailored to their linguistic and cultural needs and ensure that they receive accessible health care and health education.

People Are Less Susceptible to Illusion When They Use Their Hands to Communicate Rather Than Estimate

2021 ◽  
pp. 095679762199155
Author(s):  
Amanda R. Brown ◽  
Wim Pouw ◽  
Diane Brentari ◽  
Susan Goldin-Meadow
Keyword(s):  
American Sign Language ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
American Sign ◽  
Estimation Task ◽  
Sign Languages ◽  
Lyer Illusion ◽  
Description Task ◽  
The Way

When we use our hands to estimate the length of a stick in the Müller-Lyer illusion, we are highly susceptible to the illusion. But when we prepare to act on sticks under the same conditions, we are significantly less susceptible. Here, we asked whether people are susceptible to illusion when they use their hands not to act on objects but to describe them in spontaneous co-speech gestures or conventional sign languages of the deaf. Thirty-two English speakers and 13 American Sign Language signers used their hands to act on, estimate the length of, and describe sticks eliciting the Müller-Lyer illusion. For both gesture and sign, the magnitude of illusion in the description task was smaller than the magnitude of illusion in the estimation task and not different from the magnitude of illusion in the action task. The mechanisms responsible for producing gesture in speech and sign thus appear to operate not on percepts involved in estimation but on percepts derived from the way we act on objects.

scholarly journals Occupational Health and Safety For Sign Language Interpreters

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Woodcock ◽  
Steven L. Fischer
Keyword(s):  
Health Education ◽  
Occupational Health ◽  
American Sign Language ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
American Sign ◽  
Health Issues ◽  
Sign Languages ◽  
Sign Language Interpreters ◽  
Sign Language Interpreting

<div>"This Guide is intended for working interpreters, interpreting students and educators, and those who employ or purchase the services of interpreters. Occupational health education is essential for professionals in training, to avoid early attrition from practice. "Sign language interpreting" is considered to include interpretation between American Sign Language (ASL) and English, other spoken languages and corresponding sign languages, and between sign languages (e.g., Deaf Interpreters). Some of the occupational health issues may also apply equally to Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) reporters, oral interpreters, and intervenors. The reader is encouraged to make as much use as possible of the information provided here". -- Introduction.</div><div><br></div>

scholarly journals Interpretation and Translation of American Sign Language for Hearing Impaired Individuals using Image Processing

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 415-420
Keyword(s):  
Image Processing ◽  
American Sign Language ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
English Language ◽  
Hearing Impaired ◽  
Hand Gesture ◽  
American Sign ◽  
The Past ◽  
Impaired People ◽  
Live Image

The growth of technology has influenced development in various fields. Technology has helped people achieve their dreams over the past years. One such field that technology involves is aiding the hearing and speech impaired people. The obstruction between common individuals and individuals with hearing and language incapacities can be resolved by using the current technology to develop an environment such that the aforementioned easily communicate among one and other. ASL Interpreter aims to facilitate communication among the hearing and speech impaired individuals. This project mainly focuses on the development of software that can convert American Sign Language to Communicative English Language and vice-versa. This is accomplished via Image-Processing. The latter is a system that does a few activities on a picture, to acquire an improved picture or to extricate some valuable data from it. Image processing in this project is done by using MATLAB, software by MathWorks. The latter is programmed in a way that it captures the live image of the hand gesture. The captured gestures are put under the spotlight by being distinctively colored in contrast with the black background. The contrasted hand gesture will be delivered in the database as a binary equivalent of the location of each pixel and the interpreter would now link the binary value to its equivalent translation delivered in the database. This database shall be integrated into the mainframe image processing interface. The Image Processing toolbox, which is an inbuilt toolkit provided by MATLAB is used in the development of the software and Histogramic equivalents of the images are brought to the database and the extracted image will be converted to a histogram using the ‘imhist()’ function and would be compared with the same. The concluding phase of the project i.e. translation of speech to sign language is designed by matching the letter equivalent to the hand gesture in the database and displaying the result as images. The software will use a webcam to capture the hand gesture made by the user. This venture plans to facilitate the way toward learning gesture-based communication and supports hearing-impaired people to converse without trouble.

Amodal phonology

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
IRIS BERENT ◽  
OUTI BAT-EL ◽  
DIANE BRENTARI ◽  
QATHERINE ANDAN ◽  
VERED VAKNIN-NUSBAUM
Keyword(s):  
American Sign Language ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Language Transfer ◽  
Morphological Properties ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
American Sign ◽  
Knowledge Of Language ◽  
Level Of Analysis ◽  
Do So

Does knowledge of language transfer spontaneously across language modalities? For example, do English speakers, who have had no command of a sign language, spontaneously project grammatical constraints from English to linguistic signs? Here, we address this question by examining the constraints on doubling. We first demonstrate that doubling (e.g. panana; generally: ABB) is amenable to two conflicting parses (identity vs. reduplication), depending on the level of analysis (phonology vs. morphology). We next show that speakers with no command of a sign language spontaneously project these two parses to novel ABB signs in American Sign Language. Moreover, the chosen parse (for signs) is constrained by the morphology of spoken language. Hebrew speakers can project the morphological parse when doubling indicates diminution, but English speakers only do so when doubling indicates plurality, in line with the distinct morphological properties of their spoken languages. These observations suggest that doubling in speech and signs is constrained by a common set of linguistic principles that are algebraic, amodal and abstract.

scholarly journals Occupational Health and Safety For Sign Language Interpreters

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Woodcock ◽  
Steven L. Fischer
Keyword(s):  
Health Education ◽  
Occupational Health ◽  
American Sign Language ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
American Sign ◽  
Health Issues ◽  
Sign Languages ◽  
Sign Language Interpreters ◽  
Sign Language Interpreting

<div>"This Guide is intended for working interpreters, interpreting students and educators, and those who employ or purchase the services of interpreters. Occupational health education is essential for professionals in training, to avoid early attrition from practice. "Sign language interpreting" is considered to include interpretation between American Sign Language (ASL) and English, other spoken languages and corresponding sign languages, and between sign languages (e.g., Deaf Interpreters). Some of the occupational health issues may also apply equally to Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) reporters, oral interpreters, and intervenors. The reader is encouraged to make as much use as possible of the information provided here". -- Introduction.</div><div><br></div>

Communications Satellites in Health Education and Health Care Delivery: Operation Considerations

1981 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 371-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. Boor ◽  
Douglas C. Schaad ◽  
Franklin W. Evans ◽  
Charles W. Dohner ◽  
M. Roy Schwarz
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Health Education ◽  
Health Care Delivery ◽  
Satellite Communication ◽  
Care Delivery ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The Past ◽  
Education And Health ◽  
World Communication ◽  
Communication Needs

In the past decade, communication satellites have assumed an increasingly significant role in meeting world communication needs. Advocates project vast arrays of potential utilization for this distance independent technology. Such expansion of use depends upon user acceptance, a variable which has as a requisite dimension, the perception of trouble-free operation and similarity with face to face verbal interaction. Following two hundred twenty-two satellite-mediated broadcasts, the authors review the variety of user-related pitfalls which occurred during this experiment in health education and health care delivery. Specific consideration is given to those problems which need to be remedied for a “user acceptable” system of satellite communication in the health care arena. Though the technical system works, it is suggested that additional emphases upon participant acceptance are necessary before the technology will be widely accepted and utilized.

scholarly journals Referring strategies in American Sign Language and English (with co-speech gesture): The role of modality in referring to non-nameable objects

2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (5) ◽  
pp. 961-987 ◽  
Author(s):  
ZED SEVCIKOVA SEHYR ◽  
BRENDA NICODEMUS ◽  
JENNIFER PETRICH ◽  
KAREN EMMOREY
Keyword(s):  
American Sign Language ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Spatial Information ◽  
Referential Communication ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
American Sign ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
Visual Spatial ◽  
Communication Task ◽  
Language Modality

ABSTRACTAmerican Sign Language (ASL) and English differ in linguistic resources available to express visual–spatial information. In a referential communication task, we examined the effect of language modality on the creation and mutual acceptance of reference to non-nameable figures. In both languages, description times reduced over iterations and references to the figures’ geometric properties (“shape-based reference”) declined over time in favor of expressions describing the figures’ resemblance to nameable objects (“analogy-based reference”). ASL signers maintained a preference for shape-based reference until the final (sixth) round, while English speakers transitioned toward analogy-based reference by Round 3. Analogy-based references were more time efficient (associated with shorter round description times). Round completion times were longer for ASL than for English, possibly due to gaze demands of the task and/or to more shape-based descriptions. Signers’ referring expressions remained unaffected by figure complexity while speakers preferred analogy-based expressions for complex figures and shape-based expressions for simple figures. Like speech, co-speech gestures decreased over iterations. Gestures primarily accompanied shape-based references, but listeners rarely looked at these gestures, suggesting that they were recruited to aid the speaker rather than the addressee. Overall, different linguistic resources (classifier constructions vs. geometric vocabulary) imposed distinct demands on referring strategies in ASL and English.

Looking for Frogs in the Narrative Stream: Global and Local Relations in Maternal Narratives

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina L. McIntire ◽  
Judy Reilly
Keyword(s):  
American Sign Language ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
American Sign ◽  
Children's Attention ◽  
Global And Local ◽  
Global Relations

Abstract In this study, we compared storytelling of a pictured narrative, Frog, Where Are You?, by 6 Deaf and 6 hearing mothers in American Sign Language (ASL) and in English, respectively. How do these mothers construct their stories, that is, how do they mark episodes? And how do English-speakers' strategies differ from ASL-users' strategies? We found that stories in ASL contained more explicit markers to signal both local and global relations of the narrative. Because of modality and grammatical differences between English and ASL, Deaf mothers seemed to have more strategies available to use. Although the overall pattern of use throughout the story was similar, Deaf mothers appeared to be more "dramatic" in their storytelling than were hearing mothers. Both groups of parents used a variety of markers to call their children's attention to the theme of the story. (Psychology)

Pragmatic and Linguistic Constraints on Message Formulation

1991 ◽  
Vol 34 (6) ◽  
pp. 1346-1361
Author(s):  
Paula M. Brown ◽  
Susan D. Fischer ◽  
Wynne Janis
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
American Sign Language ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Hearing Impaired ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
American Sign ◽  
Hearing Status ◽  
Linguistic Constraints ◽  
Production Decision

This study provides a cross-linguistic replication, using American Sign Language (ASL), of the Brown and Dell (1987) finding that when relaying an action involving an instrument, English speakers are more likely to explicitly mention the instrument if it is atypically, rather than typically, used to accomplish that action. Subjects were 20 hearing-impaired users of English and 20 hearing-impaired users of ASL. Each subject read and retold, in either English or ASL, 20 short stories. Analyses of the stories revealed production decision differences between ASL and English, but no differences related to hearing status. In ASL, there is more explicitness, and importance seems to play a more pivotal role in instrument specification. The results are related to differences in the typology of English and ASL and are discussed with regard to secondlanguage learning and translation

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