Background: Deafness has an adverse impact on children's ability to acquire spoken languages. Signed languages offer a more accessible input for deaf children, but because the vast majority are born to hearing parents who do not sign, their early exposure to sign language is limited. Deaf children as a whole are therefore at high risk of language…

This paper reports a case study of the nature and extent of progress in speaking skills made by a group of upper intermediate instructed learners, and also assessors' perceptions of that progress. Initial and final interview data were analysed using several measures of Grammatical and Lexical Complexity, Language Accuracy and Fluency. These…

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…