Sign language vocabulary learning: uncovering fast cross-language interactions between signs and words

Dynamics of oral language and speech production through neuromodulation: A systematic review of non-invasive brain stimulation in neurodegeneration.

Like any other language, sign language is, among other things, guided by phonological principles involving several parameters combining in space to form lexical signs. According to Klima and Bellugi (1979), a simple lexical sign is essentially a simultaneous occurrence of a particular value of each of the several parameters. These parameters occur within a constrained signing space in combination with each other. William Stokoe (1960) equated phonology in oral language to what he termed cherology in sign language. However, most sign linguists prefer to use the term phonology. In oral language, phonology is the study of sounds, but in sign language, it is concerned with the parameters that make sign language a systematic and intelligible language system. One basic difference between oral and sign language is that in oral language we use words while in sign language we use signs. The other important difference is that while oral language is produced in the oral cavity using articulatory organs such as the mouth, sign language is produced in space using mostly the hands. Yet the structural difference is that while a phoneme in oral language is the basic unit of a word a chereme in sign language is the basic unit of a sign. In oral language words are organized sequentially while the signs in sign language are organized as a combination of simultaneously occurring components derived from several spatial dimensions. The purpose of this paper is to examine the parameters that characterize sign language and to demonstrate the formation, vocabulary and organization of signs. The paper demonstrates how signs are executed in space. The paper addresses four major phonological (cherological) parameters of sign language, namely hand configuration (hand shape), place of articulation (location / position), movement and orientation. Major parameters save to distinguish very large classes of signs. In addition the paper articulates how these parameters combine to formulate meaningful signs within the constrained signing space. From the analysis, the author concludes that the phonology of sign language is highly complex and is resident in space as a function of the hand acting as a highly articulatory linguistic organ.

Introduction Intervention and educational approaches ranging from oral language only to oral language combined with various forms of sign language have evolved. The aim of this study was to understand the choices of language for the deaf/ hearing impaired child for communication by the parents using a survey questionnaire. The objectives were to adapt the questionnaire given by to obtain the information about the choices of communication mode and the process of selection. Materials and Methods Participants included in this study were parents of hearing impaired and deaf children in Bengaluru. Modified and shortlisted 31 questions given to ten teachers of deaf and sign language users for content validation and those suggestions were incorporated. Questionnaire was provided to parents of hearing impaired and deaf children. Results Study showed majority were fitted with devices to help their hearing – hearing aid and cochlear implant and joined oral school for education. Age of Intervention was early only in small number of children. Sign language as a mode of communication was reported in only 20.3% and 59.3% reportedly not used sign language at all. The families that used sign language reported the reason for the choice being ease of use. Regardless of competence of children in oral language, majority of parent’s aspiration was oral language, followed by sign and oral language. Choosing sign language as a primary communication mode is seen in minority of parents. The survey also showed though children are in oral school, mode communication is not always oral. Peer group interaction and interaction with family members require sign and actions-gestures along with oral language. Conclusion The study emphasized the importance of learning oral language and sign language for deaf and hearing-impaired children. Parental concerns revolved around educational opportunities of deaf/ hearing impaired child population may be reduced.

Rhe study compares sign and oral language in terms of information transmission efficiency. The sample consisted of 36 hearing people with no knowledge of sign language and 36 deaf people reasonably fluent in sign language. (The deaf participants' level of hearing loss ranged from severe to profound.) Oral and sign language comprehension was assessed by means of texts at three different difficulty levels. After being exposed to the texts, the study participants had to tell what they had understood about them, answer a set of related questions, and offer a title for each text. When the hearing group's comprehension of oral versions of the texts was compared to the deaf group's comprehension of signed versions, the deaf group showed better comprehension of the explicit content of the texts but added more invented content and made more errors.

The use of storytelling on students’ first language literacy and development were extended to foreign/second language learning, and a large number of researchers interested in the field attempted to use storytelling and story reading strategies in teaching oral language skills to foreign/second language learners. Despite the existence of a number of studies on the impact of storytelling on English language skills, the number of studies on the impact of storytelling and story reading approaches on pre- intermediate EFL learners’ oral language production and comprehension seems to be scanty. To do so, a quasi- experimental study was employed. Ninety Iranian language learners, from 6 intact classes (each consisting of 15), were divided to three sub-groups: storytelling, story reading and conventional groups. To one group, stories were told, one group only read the stories, and the third group received no stories. The data were collected through researcher developed oral language production and comprehension tests. One-way-ANOVA test and three independent samples-tests based on Bonferroni test were employed to analyze the data and locate the sources of the differences. Findings revealed that storytelling outperformed story reading groups on both production and comprehension tests. Story reading group outperformed the conventional group. It can be concluded telling and reading stories are effective techniques for improving EFL learners’ oral language production and recognition.

This article aims to analyze disfluencies produced in signing in Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) during an interview involving a deaf interviewee and a hearing interviewer. The theoretical-analytical framework is aligned with psycholinguistic studies focused on characterizing disfluencies in oral language production (by identifying the structure of sequences with disfluencies, their moments of occurrence, and their functions). The aim is to evaluate the possibility of correlating types of disfluencies in oral languages with those observed in sign languages. The article reports the most recurrent types of disfluencies in sign languages in the situation under scrutiny, including pauses (filled and silent), repairs, sign repetitions, and segmentation restarts, seeking to identify their points of occurrence, functions and associated cognitive processes.

Deafness is a sensory impairment which strongly affects the normal acquisition and development of linguistic abilities. Deaf people are severely hindered in the development of oral speech because they do not have direct access to the linguistic input and many of them do not acquire much more than the rudiments of oral communication. While hearing children acquire easily and naturally a spoken language, deaf children might acquire in the same way a sign language, exploiting the visual modality. This study investigated the general linguistic competence in Italian of four different groups of deaf individuals (orally-trained children with cochlear implants, native signers, non-native signers and deaf foreigners adolescents and adults), by using a standardized picture matching task, in order to determine the level of their linguistic competence. Results revealed that most deaf individuals showed a performance comparable to that of very young hearing children. Cochlear implanted children performed significantly better than all the other groups, and the less accurate performance was that of foreigner deaf students, who often have not any kind of underlying language. Despite the better performance of cochlear implanted children, who generally do not use the sign language, the best solution to approach the oral language would appear to be the combination of oral training and sign language, in order to be able to communicate with both the deaf and the hearing communities. The school system in this sense should find some strategies in order to help deaf foreigners to get access to the grammar of the oral language.

Phonological processing of rhyme in spoken language and location in sign language by deaf and hearing participants: A neurophysiological study

Permanent hearing loss affects 1 to 3 per 1000 children and interferes with typical communication development. Early detection through newborn hearing screening and hearing technology provide most children with the option of spoken language acquisition. However, no consensus exists on optimal interventions for spoken language development. To conduct a systematic review of the effectiveness of early sign and oral language intervention compared with oral language intervention only for children with permanent hearing loss. An a priori protocol was developed. Electronic databases (eg, Medline, Embase, CINAHL) from 1995 to June 2013 and gray literature sources were searched. Studies in English and French were included. Two reviewers screened potentially relevant articles. Outcomes of interest were measures of auditory, vocabulary, language, and speech production skills. All data collection and risk of bias assessments were completed and then verified by a second person. Grades of Recommendation, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) was used to judge the strength of evidence. Eleven cohort studies met inclusion criteria, of which 8 included only children with severe to profound hearing loss with cochlear implants. Language development was the most frequently reported outcome. Other reported outcomes included speech and speech perception. Several measures and metrics were reported across studies, and descriptions of interventions were sometimes unclear. Very limited, and hence insufficient, high-quality evidence exists to determine whether sign language in combination with oral language is more effective than oral language therapy alone. More research is needed to supplement the evidence base.

Summary: Sign language is the primary daily language of many Deaf people, yet sign language is not always included as a part of Deaf Education. Teachers of the Deaf in France in the late 1700s and early 1800s established using sign language in the classroom and yet generations later educators chose to revert back to oralism, not including any sign language when teaching Deaf children. And the trend continues to this day. Researchers in the 1960s, 70s and 80s proved that sign languages are natural languages, and yet this fact did not change the difficulties schools still have in reassuring parents and administrators that the Deaf students will learn to communicate, read and write a sign language as with your fellow listeners regarding oral languages that speak. Now, in the 21st century most educators and researchers are aware that sign languages are sophisticated languages with grammar, syntax and large vocabularies. Yet accepting sign languages as written languages has taken longer. Those who support the idea of writing sign languages feel that the availability of written literature and poetry in sign languages will lead to improved literacy in oral languages and in the long run, increase acceptance by the hearing world. Showing that sign languages have a written form helps establish sign languages as foreign languages in schools. With the advent of the internet and social media, writing sign languages is spreading quickly. The year 2020 is the beginning of a new era of sign language literature.Keywords: Sign Language; Literature; SignWriting; Deaf; Education.

An examination of various French and English documents of the 18th and 19th century, especially reports, articles and books written by instructors of the deaf in Europe and the U.S. throws light on the conditions under which and the ways in which manual language evolved over the last two hundred years. This inquiry has revealed the following: (1) Manual languages in the U.S., France, and Italy (among other countries) have been subject to systematic efforts at annihilation by the dominant (oral) language group. (2) In this, they are like other minority languages such as Basque, Catalan, Canadian French, etc. (3) Efforts at annihilation take two forms — dialectizing a language (Provencal in France) or outright replacement (American Indian Languages in the U.S.). With regard to manual communication in the U.S., the former approach is called “Signed English”, the latter “oralism”. (4) Both ways of annihilating sign have been attempted in the 18th and 19th centuries, generally in alternation, using the schools as a vehicle, and with little lasting effect. (5) Intrusions from oral language that remain in ASL can often be detected because of their lack of pictorial roots. It is hypothesized that all formational, morphological and syntactic processes in ASL that do not have a pictorial basis are either the result of extrinsic oral language forces or the intrinsic evolution from iconicity to encodedness.

Lack of an effective early sign language learning framework for a hard-of-hearing population can have traumatic consequences, causing social isolation and unfair treatment in workplaces. Alphabet and digit detection methods have been the basic framework for early sign language learning but are restricted by performance and accuracy, making it difficult to detect signs in real life. This article proposes an improved sign language detection method for early sign language learners based on the You Only Look Once version 8.0 (YOLOv8) algorithm, referred to as the intelligent sign language detection system (iSDS), which exploits the power of deep learning to detect sign language-distinct features. The iSDS method could overcome the false positive rates and improve the accuracy as well as the speed of sign language detection. The proposed iSDS framework for early sign language learners consists of three basic steps: (i) image pixel processing to extract features that are underrepresented in the frame, (ii) inter-dependence pixel-based feature extraction using YOLOv8, (iii) web-based signer independence validation. The proposed iSDS enables faster response times and reduces misinterpretation and inference delay time. The iSDS achieved state-of-the-art performance of over 97% for precision, recall, and F1-score with the best mAP of 87%. The proposed iSDS method has several potential applications, including continuous sign language detection systems and intelligent web-based sign recognition systems.

The speech and language training for deaf children at our clinic is performed using a multisensory method, which consists of reception and expression training for sign language and fingerspelling as well as auditory training, lip reading, and written language training (the Kanazawa Method). We have already reported that acquisition of written language is not dependent on oral language, and that written language is easier to learn than oral language for deaf children. In the present investigation, we analyzed the acquisition of comprehensible and expressive vocabulary in sign language and fingerspelling. The subjects were two children congenitally deaf at levels higher than 105dB. Recorded language samples by the age of 48 months were analyzed. Acquisition of sign language was found to be significantly easier than acquisition of oral language. The development of expressive noun words, function words, and Wh-question words in sign language at the early period was almost equivalent to that of hearing peers, and then the sign language appeared transfer to the oral language. These results suggest that early presentation of sign language with written and oral language is effective in the acquisition of communicative attitudes, function words and interrogative sentences which are most difficult for the hearing-impaired. It was shown that early presentation of sign language with written and oral language serves to promote acquisition of oral language.

Many people hardly believe that sign language is a fully fledged language. Some people mistakenly think that sign language is oral language conveyed through signs while some think that it is a manual code of English for instance. They think that it is a type of pantomime (exaggerated set of signs) rather than a real language. There are also misconceptions among the public that sign language can only be used to express concrete information and that it is universal. Signs in a sign language have been regarded simply as unanalysable iconic gestures with little or no internal organisation at all. To the contrary, linguistic research has however demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that sign languages of the world are fully fledged languages with their own formal grammatical structures and well established lexicons. William Stokoe (1960) was the first researcher to demonstrate that signs of a sign language have an internal sub lexical structure analogous to that found in words of spoken languages. Thus, sign language is comparable to spoken language both in terms of complexity and expressiveness. It is not a manual rendition of oral language, but an independent formal language in its own right. In addition, sign language is not universal, but just like in the case of oral/spoken languages which are spoken by different people in different countries, deaf people around the world sign different sign languages. The sign language grammatical structure subscribes to the same linguistic rules enjoyed by oral language.

The present study is an endeavor to explore the potential of dynamic assessment (DA) as a way of scaffolding English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ oral production. Although the literature on dynamic assessment is rich with studies focused on language components and skills such as vocabulary, reading, and writing, very few studies have attempted to examine the role of dynamic assessment in fostering real-time oral production. It is assumed that assessment of learners’ oral production need not focus solely on evaluation; rather, learners need to determine their weaknesses and try to compensate for them with the help of a more knowledgeable peer. Therefore, the present study also focused on evaluating the role of DA in Iranian EFL learners’ oral narrative task performances in the classroom. Furthermore, an attempt was made to explore the role of gender in the production of mediated narratives. For this purpose, a total of 60 students from two private universities were assigned to two intact classes: One class served as the experimental group, which was exposed to teachers’ mediation in learners’ narrative productions, and the other group functioned as the control group and received no such mediation for their oral narrative language production. The overall speech quality of learners’ production from each narrative over the treatment period provided the required data. The results were analyzed through independent samples t-tests, which revealed significant effects of both group and gender differences. The experimental learners, as expected, were able to progress and cultivate their oral production abilities after having been exposed to DA. Regarding gender, male participants were more successful in terms of enhanced second language oral production. The study has significant implications for the integration of DA into learners’ oral production, suggesting that EFL narrative production is a skill that is highly anxiety-provoking for learners.