Discourses Of Prejudice In The professions: The Case Of Sign Languages

There is no evidence that learning a natural human language is cognitively harmful to children. To the contrary, multilingualism has been argued to be beneficial to all. Nevertheless, many professionals advise the parents of deaf children that their children should not learn a sign language during their early years, despite strong evidence across many research disciplines that sign languages are natural human languages. Their recommendations are based on a combination of misperceptions about (1) the difficulty of learning a sign language, (2) the effects of bilingualism, and particularly bimodalism, (3) the bona fide status of languages that lack a written form, (4) the effects of a sign language on acquiring literacy, (5) the ability of technologies to address the needs of deaf children and (6) the effects that use of a sign language will have on family cohesion. We expose these misperceptions as based in prejudice and urge institutions involved in educating professionals concerned with the healthcare, raising and educating of deaf children to include appropriate information about first language acquisition and the importance of a sign language for deaf children. We further urge such professionals to advise the parents of deaf children properly, which means to strongly advise the introduction of a sign language as soon as hearing loss is detected

Support For Parents Of Deaf Children: Common Questions And Informed, Evidence-Based Answers

To assist medical and hearing-science professionals in supporting parents of deaf children, we have identified common questions that parents may have and provide evidence-based answers. In doing so, a compassionate and positive narrative about deafness and deaf children is offered, one that relies on recent research evidence regarding the critical nature of early exposure to a fully accessible visual language, which in the United States is American Sign Language (ASL). This evidence includes the role of sign language in language acquisition, cognitive development, and literacy. In order for parents to provide a nurturing and anxiety-free environment for early childhood development, signing at home is important even if their child also has the additional nurturing and care of a signing community. It is not just the early years of a child\u27s life that matter for language acquisition; it\u27s the early months, the early weeks, even the early days. Deaf children cannot wait for accessible language input. The whole family must learn simultaneously as the deaf child learns. Even moderate fluency on the part of the family benefits the child enormously. And learning the sign language together can be one of the strongest bonding experiences that the family and deaf child have

Ensuring Language Acquisition For Deaf Children: What Linguists Can Do

Parents of small deaf children need guidance on constructing home and school environments that affect normal language acquisition. They often turn to physicians and spiritual leaders and, increasingly, the internet. These sources can be underinformed about crucial issues, such as matters of brain plasticity connected to the risk of linguistic deprivation, and delay or disruption in the development of cognitive skills interwoven with linguistic ability. We have formed a team of specialists in education, linguistics, pediatric medicine, and psychology, and at times specialists in theology and in law have joined our group. We argue that deaf children should be taught a sign language in the early years. This does not preclude oral-aural training and assistive technology. With a strong first language (a sign language), the child can become bilingual (with the written form of the ambient spoken language and, perhaps, the spoken form), accruing the benefits of bilingualism. We have published in medical journals, addressing primary care physicians, in a journal with a spiritual-leader readership, and in a health-law journal. Articles in progress address medical educators and practitioners. Team members present findings at conferences, work on lobbying and legislative efforts with the National Association of the Deaf, and spread the word at conferences of target audiences. We share our work in Word format, so that anyone can easily appropriate it for our common interests. One of our articles has been downloaded over 27,000 times (as of April 2014), and we are asked to consult with committees in other countries as they draft national policies

Avoiding Linguistic Neglect Of Deaf Children

Deaf children who are not provided with a sign language early in their development are at risk of linguistic deprivation; they may never be fluent in any language, and they may have deficits in cognitive activities that rely on a firm foundation in a first language. These children are socially and emotionally isolated. Deafness makes a child vulnerable to abuse, and linguistic deprivation compounds the abuse because the child is less able to report it. Parents rely on professionals as guides in making responsible choices in raising and educating their deaf children. But lack of expertise on language acquisition and overreliance on access to speech often result in professionals not recommending that the child be taught a sign language or, worse, that the child be denied sign language. We recommend action that those in the social welfare services can implement immediately to help protect the health of deaf children

Captions versus transcripts for online video content

ABSTRACT Captions provide deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) users ac cess to the audio component of web videos and television. While hearing consumers can watch and listen simultane ously, the transformation of audio to text requires deaf view ers to watch two simultaneous visual streams: the video and the textual representation of the audio. This can be a prob lem when the video has a lot of text or the content is dense, e.g., in Massively Open Online Courses. We explore the ef fect of providing caption history on users' ability to follow captions and be more engaged. We compare traditional onvideo captions that display a few words at a time to off-video transcripts that can display many more words at once, and investigate the trade off of requiring more effort to switch be tween the transcript and visuals versus being able to review more content history. We find significant difference in users' preferences for viewing video with on-screen captions over off-screen transcripts in terms of readability, but no signifi cant difference in users' preferences in following and under standing the video and narration content. We attribute this to viewers' perceived understanding significantly improving when using transcripts over captions, even if they were less easy to track. We then discuss the implications of these re sults for on-line education, and conclude with an overview of potential methods for combining the benefits of both onscreen captions and transcripts

What Medical Education Can Do To Ensure Robust Language Development In Deaf Children

The typical medical education curriculum does not address language development for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children. However, this issue is medical because of the frequency with which DHH children as a population face health complications due to linguistic deprivation. The critical period for language development is early; if a child does not acquire an intact language before age five, the child is unlikely to ever have native-like use of any language. Such linguistic deprivation carries risks of cognitive delay and psycho-social health difficulties. Spoken language is inaccessible for many DHH children despite assistive-technology developments. But sign languages, because they are visual, are accessible to most DHH children. To ensure language development, DHH children should have exposure to a sign language in their early years, starting at birth. If they also receive successful training in processing and producing a spoken language, they will have the many benefits of bimodal bilingualism. Undergraduate medical education curricula should include information about early language acquisition so that physicians can advise families of deaf newborns and newly deafened young children how to protect their cognitive health. Graduate medical education in primary care, pediatrics, and otolaryngology should include extensive information about amplification/cochlear implants, language modality, and the latest research/practices to promote the development and education of DHH children. Training in how to establish connections with local authorities and services that can support parents and child should be included as well. Further, students need to learn how to work with sign language interpreters in caring for DHH patients. We offer suggestions as to how medical curricula can be appropriately enriched and point to existing programs and initiatives that can serve as resources