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PubMed1984

A vocabulary test for chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).

Chimpanzees can communicate in American Sign Language (ASL) to independent human observers whose only source of information is the ASL signs of the chimpanzees. A vocabulary test was presented to 4 cross-fostered chimpanzees (4-6 years old). Thirty-five-millimeter color slides were projected on a screen that could be seen by the chimpanzee subject but not by the human observers. There were two observers: O1 was the questioner in the testing room with the subject; O2 was in a different room. Neither observer could see the other, or the responses of the other observer. O1 and O2 agreed in their readings of both correct and incorrect signs, and most of the signs were the correct ASL names of the slides. In order to show that the chimpanzees were naming natural language categories--that the sign DOG could refer to any dog, FLOWER to any flower, SHOE to any shoe--each test trial was a first trial in that test slides were presented only once. Analysis of errors showed that two aspects of the signs, gestural form and conceptual category, governed the distribution of errors.

Animals↗

PubMed1994

The development of graphic symbols for medical symptoms to facilitate communication between health care providers and receivers.

Since there are a variety of communication barriers in health care settings in Japan, a study was designed to improve communication by the use of graphic symbols. At the beginning of this study, graphic symbols were developed to correspond to 26 basic symptoms. Seventy-six subjects voluntarily evaluated the comprehensibility of these symbols: nursing students (n = 29), manual sign language interpreters (n = 24), hearing impaired subjects with normal (n = 10), limited (n = 11), and minimal (n = 2) literacy abilities. The comprehension by each respondent of each symbol was compared with that of the authors. On the average, numbers of the matching meanings were 24.9 +/- 1.36 (mean +/- S.D.) for students, 24.5 +/- 1.77 for interpreters, 23.4 +/- 2.22, and 21.5 +/- 3.01 for the first two groups of the hearing impaired. Among the 26 symbols, 10 showed high levels of the matching rates (> 90%) for all groups. These symbols were considered to be effective alternatives to verbal expression. Further refinements of the graphic symbols were suggested to suppress the differences in interpretation of the remainder of the symbols. During this study, colleagues and subjects suggested cognitive strategies to clarify and enhance the meaning of the graphic symbols such as (a) the subtraction of excessive information, (b) the addition of further information, and (c) the simplification of the setting by minimizing social and cultural bias.

Adult↗

PubMed1987

Predicting spoken language acquisition of profoundly hearing-impaired children.

The Spoken Language Predictor (SLP) Index is a proposed guide for making recommendations regarding the most appropriate communication mode to be used in educating a given hearing-impaired child. The SLP Index is the sum of points obtained on five predictor factors that have been weighted according to their contribution to successful spoken language acquisition. The point values assigned for each factor as well as assignment of points to particular test scores within each factor was accomplished by subjective clinical judgment followed by trial application to actual clinic cases. Three ranges of SLP indexes are associated with three educational recommendations: speech emphasis (SLP = 80-100), provisional speech instruction (SLP = 60-75), and sign language emphasis (SLP = 0-55). The purpose of this article is to describe the development and application of the SLP and preliminary evidence for its stability and validity.

Child↗

PubMed1982

Manual communication skills in aphasia.

This study investigated the acquisition and use of American Sign Language (ASL) and American Indian Gestural Code (Amerind) in 8 aphasic adults. Subjects received 2 hours of instruction for 4 weeks in 20 signs from each system. No difference was found in ease of acquisition between the sign systems in these subjects. However, when specific subject characteristics were noted, auditory comprehension skills wer significantly related to subjects' abilities to learn the signs. Subjects' residual expressive language skills were found not to be related to their abilities to learn either sign system.

Aphasia↗

PubMed1982

Comparison of sign versus verbal symbol training in retarded adults.

Sign language as an alternative or as an augmentive system to verbal language training in the mentally retarded is in widespread use. This study began an exploration of the relationship between sign and verbal learning in 10 institutionalized severely mentally retarded adults. Three experimental groups were taught color labels. Three persons received sign training only, 4 more received verbal training only, and last 3 received combined verbal and sign training. Sign labels tended to be learned more efficiently than verbal labels by this small group. Combined sign and verbal training improved verbal learning whereas sign learning was not improved through the combined approach. Replication and extension of this preliminary work with a larger and more representative sample is needed.

Adult↗

PubMed1994

Cortical deafness: a longitudinal study.

We have studied a patient with MRI-confirmed bilateral absence of considerable portions of her temporal lobes resulting in cortical deafness. Although physiologic measures demonstrate normal peripheral hearing sensitivity, this patient's speech has the inflection and prosodic characteristics associated with profound peripheral hearing loss, and she is unable to understand spoken communication. Behaviorally obtained pure-tone thresholds taken over nearly 20 years range from normal to moderate hearing loss with normal middle ear muscle reflexes and normal ABRs; however, we consistently found abnormal middle latency and cortical evoked potentials. Because of her total inability to communicate auditorily, this patient was ultimately taught American Sign Language and educated at the Louisiana School for the Deaf. This rare case highlights the importance of using multiple audiologic measures sensitive to abnormalities at various levels of the auditory system.

Adult↗

PubMed1993

Visual imagery and visual-spatial language: enhanced imagery abilities in deaf and hearing ASL signers.

The ability to generate visual mental images, to maintain them, and to rotate them was studied in deaf signers of American Sign Language (ASL), hearing signers who have deaf parents, and hearing non-signers. These abilities are hypothesized to be integral to the production and comprehension of ASL. Results indicate that both deaf and hearing ASL signers have an enhanced ability to generate relatively complex images and to detect mirror image reversals. In contrast, there were no group differences in ability to maintain information in images for brief periods or to imagine objects rotating. Signers' enhanced visual imagery abilities may be tied to specific linguistic requirements of ASL (referent visualization, topological classifiers, perspective shift, and reversals during sign perception).

Adult↗

PubMed1990

Total communication use among elementary teachers of hearing-impaired children.

This study examined the degree to which teachers' signed Manually Coded English messages represented their spoken utterances. Results indicate that educators in early elementary programs can, and do, provide a complete manual representation of their spoken English messages. This is in contrast with earlier research with middle school educators and parents of hearing-impaired children. Findings indicate that MCE proficiency may be influenced both by teacher attitude regarding the importance of signing a complete message and the degree to which program supervisors monitor teacher implementation of clearly specified MCE policies. Findings from this study have implications for programs to train teachers in using MCE and also provide information on the effects of program policy on teacher use of sign language.

Child↗

PubMed1995

How to work with an interpreter.

The Audit Commission recently highlighted the need for health services to plan language services to help the problems of poor communication facing non-English speaking patients. Doctors and other health workers need to know how to work effectively when interviewing patients with an interpreter. This article describes the different options for helping non-English speaking patients; explains how interviews should be conducted with a trained interpreter, including those using sign language; and outlines the extent of interpreting services currently available in the United Kingdom, complete with a list of addresses of organisations offering interpreting services.

Communication↗

PubMed1985

Signs of intelligence in cross-fostered chimpanzees.

In cross-fostering, the young of one species are reared by adults of another, as in the classical ethological studies of imprinting and song-learning. In our laboratory, infant chimpanzees were reared under human conditions that included two-way communication in American Sign Language (A.S.L.), the gestural language of the deaf in North America. A large body of evidence from five chimpanzees demonstrated stage by stage replication of basic aspects of the acquisition of speech and signs by hearing and deaf children. Here we review evidence that, under double-blind conditions: (i) the chimpanzees communicated information in A.S.L. to human observers; (ii) independent human observers agreed in their identification of the chimpanzee signs, (iii) the chimpanzees could use the signs to refer to natural language categories: DOG for any dog, FLOWER for any flower, SHOE for any shoe.

Animals↗

PubMed1994

Deaf children reading fables: using ASL summaries to improve reading comprehension.

This study was a cooperative effort of two university-based reading educators and a reading teacher-librarian who is deaf. An intervention technique was designed based on studies emphasizing the importance of using American Sign Language (ASL) to build deaf children's background knowledge before they read materials that support the learning of English. The teacher used the ASL summary technique; that is, she signed a summary of a fable in ASL without giving the moral lesson before having the students read the fable in printed English. "Retelling scores" were computed for seven deaf elementary school students who read some fables with the ASL intervention and read other fables without the intervention. The students' responses in telling the moral lesson of each fable were also scored. The data showed that the ASL summary technique increased the quantity and quality of the retelling scores; it also improved deaf readers' comprehension of the moral lessons of the fables. A description of the ASL summary technique and a discussion of its implications for teachers are provided.

Child↗

PubMed1989

Isolated sign vocabulary acquisition by hearing adults: CAI vs. videotaped presentation.

The present study was designed to examine receptive learning of 30 ASL signs using two teaching modes. Subjects were 28 college students with normal hearing, naive to sign language, who were trained under computer-assisted instruction (CAI) or through videotaped presentation (VT). The results indicated significantly (p less than .01) higher scores under the VT condition when sign learning and retention were probed three and 10 days after training.

Adult↗

PubMed1986

Vocal and gestural responses of cross-fostered chimpanzees.

Ten positive, five neutral, and five negative events were presented to two chimpanzees, Tatu (female, 64 months old) and Dar (male, 56 months old), who had been cross-fostered from birth by human beings. Each event was announced in American Sign Language 10 s before. The announcements and events were common items in the cross-fostering routines and were administered according to a balanced design over a period of 2 months. Vocal and signed responses to the announcements and to the events were recorded. The likelihood of either mode of response depended on affective charge, and the likelihood of vocal and signed responses was positively correlated. Signed responses were more likely than vocal responses; signed responses were more likely to be evoked by announcements than by events, whereas vocal responses were more likely to be evoked by events than by announcements. The type of vocal response depended on the affective charge and on whether the response was immediate (to the event) or anticipatory (to the announcement). Incorporation of signs and phrases from the announcements, and reiteration of signs and phrases within an utterance depended on affective charge, just as they do for human children.

Affect↗

PubMed1991

ASL and the family system.

This paper examines some of the sociological implications of poor interaction on families in which one of the members is deaf. When a family systems perspective is used, once a child is diagnosed as deaf the family is no longer considered "hearing"; the parents may be hearing, the other children may be, but the family system becomes "hearing and deaf." By viewing this as a hearing/deaf problem, it becomes clear that no adequate solution can be found without the participation of deaf adults and the benefit of their perspectives and insights. We suggest that attention be directed toward neutralizing the effects of the stigma associated with deafness so that American Sign Language can become a pivotal tool for facilitating functional symbolic interaction in hearing/deaf families.

Child↗

PubMed1990

Short-term memory coding by deaf signers: the primary language coding hypothesis reconsidered.

Shand (Cognitive Psychology, 1982, 14, 1-12) hypothesized that strong reliance on a phonetic code by hearing individuals in short-term memory situations reflects their primary language experience. As support for this proposal, Shand reported an experiment in which deaf signers' recall of lists of printed English words was poorer when the American Sign Language translations of those words were structurally similar than when they were structurally unrelated. He interpreted this result as evidence that the deaf subjects were recoding the printed words into sign, reflecting their primary language experience. This primary language interpretation is challenged in the present article first by an experiment in which a group of hearing subjects showed a similar recall pattern on Shand's lists of words, and second by a review of the literature on short-term memory studies with deaf subjects. The literature survey reveals that whether or not deaf signers recode into sign depends on a variety of task and subject factors, and that, contrary to the primary language hypothesis, deaf signers may recode into a phonetic code in short-term recall.

Adult↗

PubMed1982

Handedness patterns in deaf persons.

The handedness patterns of 226 deaf high-school and college students were compared to those of 210 college students with normal hearing. Both groups evidenced many more right-handed than left-handed members, as determined by responses to a hand preference questionnaire and performance on an activity test battery. There was, however, a significantly higher incidence of left-handedness among the deaf subjects than among the hearing. Moreover, the left-handed deaf students were found to be less likely to have deaf relatives, and to have been introduced to sign language later in their development than the deaf student population as a whole. These findings were interpreted as showing that age of acquisition of language was related to the development of handedness patterns, whereas auditory processing experience probably was not.

Auditory Perception↗

PubMed1987

Temporal processing in deaf signers.

The auditory and visual modalities differ in their capacities for temporal analysis, and speech relies on more rapid temporal contrasts than does sign language. We examined whether congenitally deaf signers show enhanced or diminished capacities for processing rapidly varying visual signals in light of the differences in sensory and language experience of deaf and hearing individuals. Four experiments compared rapid temporal analysis in deaf signers and hearing subjects at three different levels: sensation, perception, and memory. Experiment 1 measured critical flicker frequency thresholds and Experiment 2, two-point thresholds to a flashing light. Experiments 3-4 investigated perception and memory for the temporal order of rapidly varying nonlinguistic visual forms. In contrast to certain previous studies, specifically those investigating the effects of short-term sensory deprivation, no significant differences between deaf and hearing subjects were found at any level. Deaf signers do not show diminished capacities for rapid temporal analysis, in comparison to hearing individuals. The data also suggest that the deficits in rapid temporal analysis reported previously for children with developmental language delay cannot be attributed to lack of experience with speech processing and production.

Adult↗

PubMed1983

Amer-Ind transparency.

Objective and reliable transparency comprehension results have been obtained on the citation form of the 193 Amer-Ind signals as presented in the original Amerind Video Dictionary. Transparency ratings, as determined by three different scoring criteria, as well as the most common errors, are presented. While transparency (42-50%) was considerably less than what has been suggested in previous reports (80-88%) it was, nevertheless, well above what has been reported for signs from American Sign Language. Transparency of repetitive signals was significantly higher than that reported for kinetic and static signals. The implications for clinical practice are discussed.

Adult↗