This paper uses data from open-ended, videotaped interviews with 12 deaf people to examine their experiences negotiating access during interactions with legal authorities. In every case, these deaf persons preferred an accommodation that involved the use of an American Sign Language interpreter, and in every case, these accommodations were problematic. Three major themes emerged from the inform...

This article presents a study that examined the impact of visual communication on the quality of the early interaction between deaf and hearing mothers and fathers and their deaf children aged between 18 and 24 months. Three communication mode groups of parent-deaf child dyads that differed by the use of signing and visual-tactile communication strategies were involved: (a) hearing parents comm...

An historical survey of the approaches to the neural basis of language and the modularity question is summarized. Evidence from aphasia, event-related potentials (ERPs), Specific Language Impairments (SLIs) in children, asymmetry of abilities as shown by linguistic ‘savants’, sign language, separation of conceptual and linguistic knowledge, other disorders such as prosopagnosia and visual agnos...

For humans, the ability to communicate and use language is instantiated not only in the vocal modality but also in the visual modality. The main examples of this are sign languages and (co-speech) gestures. Sign languages, the natural languages of Deaf communities, use systematic and conventionalized movements of the hands, face, and body for linguistic expression. Co-speech gestures, though no...

Studies have shown that American Sign Language (ASL) fluency has a positive impact on deaf individuals' English reading, but the cognitive and cross-linguistic mechanisms permitting the mapping of a visual-manual language onto a sound-based language have yet to be elucidated. Fingerspelling, which represents English orthography with 26 distinct hand configurations, is an integral part of ASL an...

Previous research indicates that motion-sensitive brain regions are engaged when comprehending motion semantics expressed by words or sentences. Using fMRI, we investigated whether such neural modulation can occur when the linguistic signal itself is visually dynamic and motion semantics is expressed by movements of the hands. Deaf and hearing users of American Sign Language (ASL) were presente...

As a visual sign, a photographic image usually represents an object or a scene; this is the habitual way of seeing it. But it accomplishes that common semiotic task by representing various formal features of the object or scene: its color, shape, texture and spatial distribution of light. The curious fact is that photography does this in very different ways. With respect to color, a pigmented o...

This exploratory study examined the attention-gaining and attention-regaining strategies used by a preschool educator who is Deaf during child-directed play. Four children (2 with typical hearing and 2 with severe-to-profound hearing loss) were videotaped interacting with the educator in two different play contexts. The educator used four different strategies to gain and to regain the children'...

We describe the design, recording and content of a Czech Sign Language database in this paper. The database is intended for training and testing of sign language recognition (SLR) systems. The UWB-06-SLR-A database contains video data of 15 signers recorded from 3 different views, two of them capture whole body and provide 3D motion data, and third one is focused on signer’s face and provide da...

Communication through sign language such as American Sign Language (ASL) requires constant visual attention, or eye gaze, as all information is received through the visual channel. For deaf adults, this is achieved by maintaining eye contact with the interaction partner. However, for children, whose early interactions are often focused around toys, books, and other objects, the task of obtainin...