Carol Padden

Reading Ability in Signing Deaf Children

This article reviews three types of claims proposing that knowledge of American Sign Language (ASL) facilitates reading development in deaf children. Arguments will be presented in support of a refinement of one such claim: That there is a relationship between ASL competence and reading. We argue th

American Sign Language and the architecture of phonological theory

ConclusionsWe have examined three derivational and two phonological rules of ASL, arguing that derivational rules feed each other, phonological rules feed each other, and derivational rules feed phonological rules, as the architecture of the theory in (2) predicts. Further, we have argued for a post-lexical phonological component in ASL by showing that the outputs of Weak Drop must be prevented from undergoing the Characteristic Adjective Rule — a derivational rule. With derivational rules in the lexicon and Weak Drop in a post-lexical phonological component, this, too, is predicted.Sign language phonology provides novel support for generative phonology. Without explicit rules and grammars, one would focus on sounds and signs themselves — entities so different that the commonality of oral and signed languages would go undiscovered. Once the rules that account for the lexical and phonological structure of ASL are discovered, however, it is striking that they interact in ways predicted by the theory.

Body as subject

The notion of subject in human language has a privileged status relative to other arguments. This special status is manifested in the behavior of subjects at the morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse levels. Here we bring evidence that subjects have privileged status at the lexical level as well, by analyzing lexicalization patterns of verbs in three different sign languages. Our analysis shows that the sublexical structure of iconic signs denoting state of affairs in these languages manifests an inherent pattern of form-meaning correspondence: the signers body consistently represents one argument of the verb, the subject. The hands, moving in relation to the body, represent all other components of the event - including all other arguments. This analysis shows that sign languages provide novel evidence in support of the centrality of the notion of subject in human language. It also solves a typological puzzle about the apparent primacy of object in sign language verb agreement, a primacy not usually found in spoken languages, in which subject agreement ranks higher. Our analysis suggests that the subject argument is represented by the body and is part of the lexical structure of the verb. Because it is always inherently represented in the structure of the sign, the subject is more basic than the object, and tolerates the omission of agreement morphology.

How the Alphabet Came to Be Used in a Sign Language

This historical account of the development of the manual alphabet in ASL (and of representational systems in other sign languages) traces fingerspelling back to the monks of the seventh century, who devised a system for representing speech without needing to speak. Many years later, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, their manual alphabet underwent significant adaptation as a result of the contact between the monks and the deaf children they tutored. This article describes the evolution of the manual alphabet from that time to the present day.

Morphological universals and the sign language type

We have shown that established sign languages comprise a morphological type. In all these languages, visuo-spatial concepts and relations are represented in a motivated yet rule-governed and linguistic morphological system. Developed sign languages also show non-motivated, grammaticalized morphology, but to a limited extent, because they are young. ABSL shows neither the motivated nor the arbitrary morphology found in more developed sign languages. The lesson from ABSL is therefore that even the motivated morphology that we find in all established sign languages requires social interaction over time to crystallize. ABSL thus vindicates the new language prototype: little or no systematic morphology. This prototype was originally formulated on the basis of creole languages, but the formulation has run into empirical difficulty in recent years, as we noted above. Because ABSL is a completely new language, it allows us to distinguish between relatively young languages (established creoles and sign languages) and new languages, and to realize that the prototype holds of the latter.

An Alphabet on Hand: The Acquisition of Fingerspelling in Deaf Children

We here report on a preliminary study of the acquisition of fingerspelling, a manual system for representing the alphabet, by young Deaf children whose first language in the home is American Sign Language (ASL). Unlike ASL, a natural language historically and structurally unrelated to spoken or written English, fingerspelling is composed of 26 distinct hand displays, one for each letter of the alphabet. Fingerspelling a word involves the rapid execution of a sequence of hand configurations, one for each letter of the word being represented. In Deaf families young Deaf children are exposed to fingerspelling used by their parents and older siblings at an early age and begin to fingerspell themselves long before they are able to read and write, and even before they are aware of the correspondence between fingerspelling and print. We raise here a central question about the process of learning systems that correspond to, but are not, natural languages -such systems as fingerspelling and writing. This paper provides a first step toward addressing this question by examining features of Deaf childrens learning to fingerspell. Like Chomsky (1971) and Read (1975), who studied writing in very young hearing children, we find that Deaf children begin thinking about fingerspelling at an early age, and indeed begin using the system before they attend school and learn about written English. We have found a number of intriguing similarities between very young children fingerspelling and very young children writing that cannot be due to the systems common link to print, for the reason that at this age children in neither group can yet read, and in particular, Deaf children are not yet able to associate fingerspelled letters with their corresponding written characters. On the surface, fingerspelling might seem to offer interesting possibilities for the study of auxiliary systems. Unlike speech and print, fingerspelling and signed languages are not cross-modal but intra-modal. Speech employs the vocal channel and print involves

Bringing health care information to the deaf community

BACKGROUND The Deaf community reports limited access to health promotion information and care. Literature review, key informant interviews, and focus groups generated a clearer understanding of the community. Health care providers, educators, and policymakers could improve medical care to the Deaf community by: 1) better understanding its culture and language; 2) creating more health education programs specifically for the Deaf community; 3) developing opportunities for more deaf people and American Sign Language (ASL) users to enter the health professions; and 4) creating incentives for hearing health care providers to become ASL proficient.

Lessons to be learned from the young deaf orthographer

In the study reported here, the nonstandard spellings produced in free-writing samples by young deaf children ages 4 to 10 years were analyzed. The forms of spellings revealed a different analysis of the English orthographic system. Instead of the pervasive sound-symbol analysis of most hearing children, the deaf children produced qualitatively different attempts. Their attempts cannot be entirely accounted for as “visual”; instead, many can be characterized as featural, involving letters as units, and features of letters spanning over more than one letter, such as position and quantity.

Competing iconicities in the structure of languages

Abstract The paper examines the role that iconicity plays in the structuring of grammars. Two main points are argued for: (a) Grammar does not necessarily suppress iconicity; rather, iconicity and grammar can enjoy a congenial relation in that iconicity can play an active role in the structuring of grammars. (b) Iconicity is not monolithic. There are different types of iconicity and languages take advantage of the possibilities afforded by them. We examine the interaction between iconicity and grammar by focusing on the ways in which sign languages employ the physical body of the signer as a rich iconic resource for encoding a variety of grammatical notions. We show that the body can play three different roles in iconic forms in sign languages: it can be used as a naming device where body parts represent body parts; it can represent the subject argument of verbal signs, and it can stand for first person. These strategies interact and sometimes compete in the languages under study. Each language resolves these competitions differently, which results in different grammars and grammatical structures. The investigation of the ways in which grammar and iconicity interact in these languages provides insight into the nature of both systems.

The gestures ASL signers use tell us when they are ready to learn math

The manual gestures that hearing children produce when explaining their answers to math problems predict whether they will profit from instruction in those problems. We ask here whether gesture plays a similar role in deaf children, whose primary communication system is in the manual modality. Forty ASL-signing deaf children explained their solutions to math problems and were then given instruction in those problems. Children who produced many gestures conveying different information from their signs (gesture-sign mismatches) were more likely to succeed after instruction than children who produced few, suggesting that mismatch can occur within-modality, and paving the way for using gesture-based teaching strategies with deaf learners.