D/deaf children of Deaf parents reportedly begin learning finger-spelling as young as thirteen months old, but deaf children born to hearing, nonsigning parents lack natural access to the native (spoken) language of their families, often exhibiting later language development. Forty-four deaf adults participated in a fingerspelling test of…

The earliest descriptions of Latin finger alphabets were recorded in southern Europe between 1579 and 1589. New literary and visual evidence for sixteenth-century Ottoman Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sign systems are presented and analyzed in this article.

A number of language acquisition patterns have been identified in the signing of a newly designated population of bimodal bilingual individuals--"heritage signers." This article examines subject-referent tracking forms in the ASL (American Sign Language) narratives of six elementary-school-aged, native-signing, bimodal bilinguals made at…

This article investigates the sequential recall of manual alphabet letters by signing deaf adolescents under two presentation conditions: fingerspelling and the listing and ordering technique (LOT) of American Sign Language. Fingerspelling presents each letter in a manner similar to the spelling of spoken words: A letter is produced and then is no…

Little is known about the nature of fingerspelling during sign language interpretation. In this small-scale, exploratory study, we examined the fingerspelling of interpreters working in five different sign languages: American Sign Language (ASL), Australian Sign Language (Auslan), British Sign Language (BSL), Irish Sign Language (ISL), and Italian…

This article reports on a correlational study of language and home factors and their role in fostering the development of alphabetic knowledge among a national sample of 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old deaf children. A structural equation model was constructed and tested in an examination of the combined impacts of student age, finger-spelling ability, and…

Linguists have long recognized the descriptive limitations of Stokoe notation, currently the most commonly used system for phonetic or phonological transcription, but continue using it because of its widespread influence (e.g., Siedlecki and Bonvillian, 2000). With the emergence of newer notation systems, the field will benefit from a discussion…

Examinations of the etymology of American Sign Language have typically involved superficial analyses of signs as they exist over a short period of time. While it is widely known that ASL is related to French Sign Language, there has yet to be a comprehensive study of this historic relationship between their lexicons. This article presents…

Educational reform and financial considerations have emphasized accountability and use of research-based materials and strategies in education. Simultaneously, with growing enrollment in elementary, secondary, and postsecondary ASL programs, the number of commercially marketed materials has grown. Do such materials stand up under scrutiny when…

This article presents the results from a preliminary investigation into the use of fingerspelling in Australian Sign Language (Auslan), drawing on data collected as part of the Sociolinguistic Variation in Australian Sign Language project (Schembri and Johnston 2004; Schembri, Johnston, and Goswell in press). This major project is a replication in…