Learning a visual language gives hearing mothers the possibility of participating in their deaf children's culture. Yet, mothers also grapple with the demands of an unmarked global hearing culture, especially as their children's deafness becomes mediated by technology and medical intervention, under the guise of progress, social mobility, equity,…

Describes the development of discourse cohesion in bilingual children through an analysis of narrative discourses produced by hearing children of deaf parents (HCDP) in both British Sign Language (BSL) and spoken English. Reference mechanisms in both languages are described in the context of recent work on narrative and discourse organization…

Describes discourse development in the sign language of 24 profoundly deaf children. Findings indicate children were acquiring appropriate discourse strategies comparable to those used by hearing children in spoken conversations and adult deaf signers. (DF)

Argues that presentations in second language conferences should not be read because written discourse is too difficult for the audience to understand, whereas spoken discourse normally has a great deal of repetition to ensure that the main points are successfully transferred. Points out that read presentations are dull and inflexible, difficult to…

Longitudinal study of a deaf child's (with deaf signing and speaking parents) speech functions revealed that the child, before age three, rarely attempted speech imitation. By age five, the child had acquired new words through speechreading and had adjusted language modes to listener needs for flexible communication, and speech behavior assumed…

Just as minority spoken languages borrow from surrounding majority languages, so British Sign Language (BSL) borrows signs from English. BSL may borrow from both spoken and written English, but here we focus on the processes involved in borrowing from the written English word, using the manual alphabet. The end result of borrowing depends on an…