Sign Language

This article concerns the forms of involvement of « not scientific » actors in research, and the emergence of new expertises, through the case of linguistic researches on sign languages. We show that the main registers of participation of deaf locutors can be described as activities of cultural and lin- guistic mediations. We then analyze what are the tasks and the responsibilities endorsed by these people within a laboratory of linguistics specialized in the analysis of the Quebecois Sign Language. This article, which relies on an ethnographic analy- sis of these scientific activities, shows how the locutors invol- ved in these researches are becoming experts. It suggests articulating the studies on science, on forms of collective actions and on emergence of new expertises, and evokes the central character of an analysis of practices – even routine – of scientific inscription and communication.

Every year, 10 000 infants are born in the United States with sensorineural deafness. Deaf children of hearing (and nonsigning) parents are unique among all children in the world in that they cannot easily or naturally learn the language that their parents speak. These parents face tough choices. Should they seek a cochlear implant for their child? If so, should they also learn to sign? As pediatricians, we need to help parents understand the risks and benefits of different approaches to parent-child communication when the child is deaf. The benefits of learning sign language clearly outweigh the risks. For parents and families who are willing and able, this approach seems clearly preferable to an approach that focuses solely on oral communication.

Cerebral organization during sentence processing in English and in American Sign Language (ASL) was characterized by employing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at 4 T. Effects of deafness, age of language acquisition, and bilingualism were assessed by comparing results from (i) normally hearing, monolingual, native speakers of English, (ii) congenitally, genetically deaf, native signers of ASL who learned English late and through the visual modality, and (iii) normally hearing bilinguals who were native signers of ASL and speakers of English. All groups, hearing and deaf, processing their native language, English or ASL, displayed strong and repeated activation within classical language areas of the left hemisphere. Deaf subjects reading English did not display activation in these regions. These results suggest that the early acquisition of a natural language is important in the expression of the strong bias for these areas to mediate language, independently of the form of the language. In addition, native signers, hearing and deaf, displayed extensive activation of homologous areas within the right hemisphere, indicating that the specific processing requirements of the language also in part determine the organization of the language systems of the brain.

This paper reviews research on deaf-blind individuals, primarily from behavioral and communicative points of view. Inclusion in the population of deaf-blind is qualified by describing a variety of subgroups and genetically based syndromes associated with deaf-blindness. Sensory assessment procedures--based primarily on residual capacities--are appraised. Consequences for everyday life are described briefly. Non-sensory, alternative classificatory schemes and procedures are presented and the results from behavior modification procedures used for correcting maladaptive behaviors are summarized. Methods for communicating tactilely are described and evaluated. Attention is also drawn to some suggestions regarding learning of alphabetic codes and sign acquisition. Finally, suggestions for future research are proposed.

This study examines the ability and development in the comprehension of abstract words with hearing impaired children. The ability to understand abstract words is quite important for their academic learning and adaptation in their school life. Here, we qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed the development of abstract vocabulary in hearing impaired children using The Standardized Comprehension Test for Abstract Words (SCTAW). We examined 75 hearing impaired children (hearing aid users, 61; cochlear implant users, 14; 1st to 10th grade) and 188 children with normal hearing (1st to 6th grade) using the Picture Vocabulary Test (PVT) and SCTAW. The PVT and SCTAW results closely correlated (r=0.87). The SCTAW scores of the hearing impaired group were lower than those of their peers with normal hearing, but the scores improved as their school grade advanced. In particular, their abstract ability began to catch up from the fifth grade. The error trends of abstract vocabulary in the two ...

This paper describes an innovative approach to training sign language interpreters, through a program established at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. The course is innovative because sign language and spoken language interpreting students jointly study key subjects, which enables all students to gain insight into the theoretical applications and professional practices of their respective working experiences. This component is particularly innovative as sign language interpreting programs are typically provided as language specific courses with little (if any) exposure to interpreting students of other languages. This paper will provide an overview of the program for both spoken and signed language interpreters, detailing the structure, content and delivery modes, with the aim of encouraging other interpreter educators to consider combining the teaching of all language interpreters.RésuméCet article décrit une approche innovatrice de la formation des interprètes en langue des signes, grâce à un programme fondé à la Macquarie University de Sydney, Australie. Le cours est innovateur parce que les étudiants en interprétation dans la langue des signes et dans la langue parlée étudient ensemble les matières principales, ce qui leur permet, à tous, de se familiariser avec les applications théoriques et les pratiques professionnelles de leurs expériences de travail respectives. Cet élément est particulièrement innovateur étant donné que les programmes d’interprétation en langue des signes sont généralement donnés en tant que cours spécifiques à la langue, avec peu de contacts avec les étudiants en interprétation d’autres langues, voire aucun. Cet article donnera un aperçu du programme des interprètes en langue des signes et en langue parlée, en détaillant la structure, le contenu et les modes de mise en oeuvre, dans le but d’encourager d’autres enseignants d’interprètes à envisager de combiner l’enseignement de tous les interprètes en langue.

As aberrant behavior is often recognized as the number one form of communication, it becomes imperative that as parents, teachers, and educators we must address and system-atically teach or provide all children with an effective means of communication. While many augmentative and alternative communication systems such as manual sign lan-guage and the Picture Exchange Communication System (Frost & Bondy, 1994) have shown tremendous success, some students with developmental disabilities students unique needs require more individually tailored communication training that necessitates empirical inquiry and use of collective expertise. Doing so may facilitate the acquisition of skills and behaviors that improve communication skills through independent appropri-ate means for meeting students’ personal needs and desires. This article systematically provides a variation of the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) including materials, resources, and methodology necessary to implement...

In 1880, the International Congress on the Education of the Deaf in Milan stipulated that speech should have 'preference' over signs in the education of deaf children, but the mode of achieving this effectively banned sign language. Endeavours to teach deaf children to articulate were not new, but this decision placed pressures on deaf institutions to favour the oral system of deaf communication over other methods. In Scotland, efforts were made to adopt oralism, but educators were faced with the reality that this was not good education practice for most pupils. This article will consider the responses of Scottish educators of deaf children from the 1870s until the beginning of the twentieth century.

Simple negation in natural languages represents a complex interrelationship of syntax, prosody, semantics and pragmatics, and may be realised in various ways: lexically, morphologically and prosodically. In almost all spoken languages, the first two of these are the primary realisations of syntactic negation. In contrast, in many signed languages negation can occur without lexical or morphological marking. Thus, in British Sign Language (BSL), negation is obligatorily expressed using face–head actions alone (facial negation) with the option of articulating a manual form alongside the required face–head actions (lexical negation). What are the processes underlying facial negation? Here, we explore this question neuropsychologically. If facial negation reflects lexico-syntactic processing in BSL, it may be relatively spared in people with unilateral right hemisphere (RH) lesions, as has been suggested for other ‘grammatical facial actions’ [Language and Speech 42 (1999) 307; Emmorey, K. (2002). Language, cognition and the brain: Insights from sign language research. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum (Lawrence)].Three BSL users with RH lesions were specifically impaired in perceiving facial compared with manual (lexical and morphological) negation. This dissociation was absent in three users of BSL with left hemisphere lesions and different degrees of language disorder, who also showed relative sparing of negation comprehension. We conclude that, in contrast to some analyses [Applied Psycholinguistics 18 (1997) 411; Emmorey, K. (2002). Language, cognition and the brain: Insights from sign language research. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum (Lawrence); Archives of Neurology 36 (1979) 837], non-manual negation in sign may not be a direct surface realisation of syntax [Language and Speech 42 (1999) 143; Language and Speech 42 (1999) 127].Difficulties with facial negation in the RH-lesion group were associated with specific impairments in processing facial images, including facial expressions. However, they did not reflect generalised ‘face-blindness’, since the reading of (English) speech patterns from faces was spared in this group. We propose that some aspects of the linguistic analysis of sign language are achieved by prosodic analysis systems (analysis of face and head gestures), which are lateralised to the minor hemisphere.

This work presents a computational model (XML) of the Brazilian Sign Language (Libras), based on its phonology. The model was used to create a sample of representative signs to aid the recording of a base of videos whose aim is to support the development of tools to support genuine social inclusion of the deaf.

Communication is the method of sharing or exchanging information, ideas or feelings. To have a communication between two people, both of them need to have knowledge and understanding of a common language. But in the case of deaf and dumb people, the means they use for communicating is different from that of normal people. Deaf is not able to hear and dumb is not able to speak. They communicate using sign language among themselves and with normal people but normal people don't take seriously the importance of sign languages. Not everyone has the knowledge and understanding of sign language which make the communication difficult between a normal person and a deaf and dumb person. For overcoming this barrier,a model can be build based on machine learning. A model can be trained to recognize different gestures of sign language and translate them into English language. This will help a lot of people in communicating with deaf and dumb people with ease. A real time ML based system is built for the real time sign language detection with TensorFlow object detection in this paper. The major purpose of this project is to build a system for the differently abled people to communicate with others easily and efficiently.

This research focused on the methods of optical character recognition technologies that applied to android-based translator application. The high number of deaf-born babies in Indonesia causes a high number of children who will grow but cannot recognize various types of letters yet because they are limited by their physical abilities. So, to help introduce letters more broadly, effectively, and efficiently, the latest technological innovations are needed, one of which is the application of converting images containing text into text and translating into sign language. In making this android-based application used Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology by using Tesseract as an engine of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for character or letter recognition.

Abstract. In RoboCup Middle Size league (MSL) the main referee uses assisting technology, controlled by a second referee, to support him, in particular for conveying referee decisions for robot players with the help of a wireless communication system. In this paper a vision-based system is introduced, able to interpret dynamic and static gestures of the referee, thus eliminating the need for a second one. The referee's ges-tures are interpreted by the system and sent directly to the Referee Box, which sends the proper commands to the robots. The system is divided into four modules: a real time hand tracking and feature extraction, a SVM (Support Vector Machine) for static hand posture identification, an HMM (Hidden Markov Model) for dynamic unistroke hand gesture recognition, and a FSM (Finite State Machine) to control the various system states transitions. The experimental results showed that the system works very reliably, being able to recognize the combination of gestures a...

Cet article présente une étude de cas de l’expression de la négation jusqu’à 3 ans chez quatre enfants évoluant dans des environnements langagiers différents : majoritairement monolingue (anglais, français, LSF) ou bilingue (LSF-français), majoritairement unimodal (modalité visuo-gestuelle de la LSF) ou bimodal (visuo-gestuelle et audio-vocale). Nous décrivons l’émergence et le développement d’une expression gestuelle multimodale, selon que la langue cible intègre (LSF) ou non (anglais, français) cette gestuelle dans sa grammaire, et explorons ainsi l’interface geste-signe. Nous nous attardons sur deux formes gestuelles présentes dans les productions de quatre enfants pour en déterminer les invariants kinésiologiques sous forme de « patrons gestuels contrastifs » et nous analysons la façon dont ces patrons dessinent des sous-ensembles sémantiques dans l’expression gestuelle de la négation et son acquisition.

Theory-of-mind (ToM) abilities were studied in 176 deaf children aged 3 years 11 months to 8 years 3 months who use either American Sign Language (ASL) or oral English, with hearing parents or deaf parents. A battery of tasks tapping understanding of false belief and knowledge state and language skills, ASL or English, was given to each child. There was a significant delay on ToM tasks in deaf children of hearing parents, who typically demonstrate language delays, regardless of whether they used spoken English or ASL. In contrast, deaf children from deaf families performed identically to same-aged hearing controls (N=42). Both vocabulary and understanding syntactic complements were significant independent predictors of success on verbal and low-verbal ToM tasks.