The tradition of the Annual Oration was introduced in the days when almost all clinical studies were carried out in this hospital, to welcome new clinical medical students. The world has changed since then and with it the curriculum, the academic calendar and, more than anything else, medical care. Although we may bemoan many of these changes, few of us would want to go back to medicine as it w...

Research at Televirtual (Norwich) and the University of East Anglia, funded predominantly by the Independent Television Commission and more recently by the UK Post Office also, has investigated the feasibility of using virtual signing as a communication medium for presenting information to the Deaf. We describe and demonstrate the underlying virtual signer technology, and discuss the language p...

For many deaf and hard-of-hearing students, access to the general education curriculum is provided, in part, by using the services of an educational interpreter. Even with a highly qualified interpreter, full access to the content and social life in a hearing classroom can be challenging, and there are many aspects of the educational placement that can affect success. The skills and knowledge o...

Sir,?With reference to the paragraph in your last issue, may I point out that Mr. Geoffrey Duveen's gift of ?15,000 to University College Hospital is for the purpose of providing "the most complete and modern treatment of the deaf," and is not intended for the general purposes of the hospital ? The money will be expended entirely on the Ear, Nose and Throat Department, and the removal of the Ro...

British Sign Language (BSL) signers use a variety of structures, such as constructed action (CA), depicting constructions (DCs), or lexical verbs, to represent action and other verbal meanings. This study examines the use of these verbal predicate structures and their gestural counterparts, both separately and simultaneously, in narratives by deaf children with various levels of exposure to BSL...

Deaf students consistently score lower on standardized measures of reading comprehension than their hearing peers. Most of the studies that have been conducted to explain this phenomenon have focused on variables within the reader, and important differences have been found between deaf and hearing readers. More recently, in the face of increasingly high-stakes consequences, researchers are look...

In recent years, scholars have been critical of what they consider unethical conduct by researchers whose studies focus on members of the Deaf or signing communities. This is the first empirical study that investigates ethical concerns and recommendations from the perspective of three stakeholder groups (Deaf research participants, researchers, and Deaf studies experts). We analyzed focus group...