The discussion on the role of American Sign Language (ASL) in deaf students' reading development has been long and contentious. The students' limited knowledge of English has been commonly perceived as a culprit in making reading difficult. However, a more nuanced explanation of reading performance and its relationship with competence in ASL's…

This paper attends to languaging in the context of visually oriented communities of sign language users through the concept of "chaining." I define chaining as the patterned, routine ways of interlinking different linguistic and multimodal elements. The goal of this paper is to discuss the concepts of chaining, languaging and…

This study investigated the impact of language modality and age of acquisition on semantic fluency in American Sign Language (ASL) and English. Experiment 1 compared semantic fluency performance (e.g., name as many animals as possible in 1 min) for deaf native and early ASL signers and hearing monolingual English speakers. The results showed…

We examined the language and reading progress of 336 young DHH children in kindergarten, first and second grades. Trained assessors tested children's language, reading, and spoken and fingerspelled phonological awareness in the fall and spring of the school year. Children were divided into groups based on their auditory access and classroom…

The purpose of this dissertation was to examine the development and importance of fingerspelling among young Deaf children of Deaf parents for communication, learning about language, and pre-literacy in their natural home environment. The rationale was to examine how Deaf parents use fingerspelling with their young Deaf children during…

Better understanding of the mechanisms underlying early reading skills can lead to improved interventions. Hence, the purpose of this study was to examine multivariate associations among reading, language, spoken phonological awareness, and fingerspelling abilities for three groups of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) beginning readers: those who…

Two lexical decision experiments are reported that investigate whether the same segmentation strategies are used for reading printed English words and fingerspelled words (in American Sign Language). Experiment 1 revealed that both deaf and hearing readers performed better when written words were segmented with respect to an orthographically…

This paper focuses upon the deaf as an American Sign Language-using community, out of the English-using mainstream. (RC)

Analysis of videotapes of five trained teachers of deaf children found that the teachers did not fingerspell often, but when they did they sought to express a specific English word. Clarity of fingerspelled utterances varied greatly, ranging from whole-word gestalts to words wherein individual letters could be discerned. (Author/CB)

The fingerspelling component of thirteen samples of Visible English (the system of communication in which all speech is supposed to be simultaneoously fingerspelled) used by teachers in classrooms in two schools for the deaf were analyzed linguistically. Only 56 percent of what should have been fingerspelled was present and legible. (Author/CFM)

Details the influence of English on British Sign Language (BSL) at the syntactic, morphological, lexical, idiomatic, and phonological levels. Shows how BSL uses loan translations, fingerspellings, and the use of mouth patterns derived from English language spoken words to include elements from English. (Author/VWL)

Reviews several experiments which examined the cognitive function of finger writing, an activity widely used by Japanese people and thought to be related to Kanji learning. Children and university students performed either Kanji anagram tasks or English word tasks. Finger writing appears to originate from the existence of motoric or action-based…

Describes single finger sign contact in data from ten different sign languages. The relative frequencies of signs using each of the four possible fingers are examined. Proposes distinctive features to explain the differences in frequency and use of these handshapes in sign languages in general. (Author/LMO)

Handshapes with single finger extension are examined in data from 10 sign languages: American, Australian, British, Finnish, French, Japanese, Providence Island, Rennell Island, Indian, and Swedish. It is concluded that a theory of marking can be developed along the same lines as for spoken language, with only the physiology differing. (Author/MSE)

Charles A. Ferguson's concept of "diglossia" (1959, 1964) is used in analyzing sign language. As in Haitian Creole or Swiss German, "two or more varieties" of sign language are "used by the same speakers under different conditions"--these are here called "High" (H) sign language and "Low" (L) sign language. H sign language is formally taught…