At the Iowa School for the Deaf, five young hearing children (age three years) were integrated into the preschool program to study the development of total communication skills including speech and language patterns. (Author/PHR)

Ten-minute video recordings of the dyadic interactions between seven deaf children (mean age 5.5 years) and their communication partners (either deaf or hearing) were analyzed. Findings are reported in terms of interaction variables (initiation, continuation, ending, and complexity) and communicative modalities (sign, actions, conventional…

Studied secondary language learning and literacy practices for Swedish deaf bilingual students for whom Swedish Sign Language is the primary language and written Swedish is the secondary language. Observations in schools for the deaf over 3 years show how everyday classroom interaction makes available and restricts opportunities for students to…

The article considers whether young deaf children of hearing parents should learn American Sign Language (ASL) as their first language and whether teachers in day high school programs should use manual communication. It concludes that, because ASL is the key to deaf culture, it should be used by parents and teachers. (DB)

Discusses a study of differences in nonliteral language use among deaf women, women who could hear, and women who could hear and who used sign language. Subjects told stories orally and in sign to children of 4 and 10 years. Deaf mothers' nonliteral content was higher, whereas hearing mothers' stories were longer. (Author/GH)

Fifty-seven college students enrolled in their first week of introductory manual communication classes demonstrated limited ability to assess their own communication skills. A discussion of sign systems, interpreter skills, and ethics aided some students in putting their skills into perspective, but 41% continued to overestimate their abilities at…

The article elaborates on the assumption that since sign languages are received and initially processed by the visual system, then the rules for the formation of signs of a sign language would be constrained by the limits of the visual system. (Author/NCR)

American Sign Language is chiefly untaught and nonstandardized. The Communicative Skills Program of the National Association of the Deaf aims to provide sign language classes for hearing personnel and to increase interpreting services. Programs, funding and aims of the Program are outlined. A government sign language planning agency is proposed.…

A review of problems with using such manual communication systems as cued speech, fingerspelling, Signed or Manual English, American Sign Language, and Pidgin Sign provides a rationale for using a combination of American Sign Language and Pidgin Sign and a few markers from Signed English for a Total Communication system. (CB)

Studied across a 16-month period, young children of deaf parents showed accelerated early language development, on the average producing their first recognizable sign at 8.5 months, their tenth sign at 13.2 months, and their first sign combination at 17.0 months. Findings are inconsistent with previously reported patterns of synchrony between…

mparison of sign language used by Urubu-Kaapor Indians in the Amazonian jungle (UKSL) and sign language used by deaf people in Sao Paulo (SPSL). In the former situation, deaf people are more integrated and accepted into their community than in Sao Paulo, because most hearing individuals are able and willing to use sign language to communicate with…

This project examined whether there is a lexicon of messages commonly used by vocational rehabilitation (VR) counselors with deaf clients that might be stored digitally on a CD-ROM disk with the eventual purpose of developing a voice-to-sign translation system to facilitate communication between hearing and deaf individuals. Surveys of counselors…

Examined the development of communicative competence in deaf children and its interactions with use of communicative gestures and/or words. Data indicated (1) the use of communicative gestures increased with age while speech remained constant; and (2) the number of gestures used correlated with communicative accuracy. Difficulty level influenced…