Peripheral Visual Reaction Time Is Faster in Deaf Adults and British Sign Language Interpreters than in Hearing Adults

Following auditory deprivation, the remaining sense of vision has shown selective enhancement in visual cognition, especially in the area of near peripheral vision. Visual acuity is poor in the far periphery and may be an area where sound confers the greatest advantage in hearing persons. Experience with a visuospatial language such as British Sign Language (BSL) makes additional demands on the visual system. To test the different and separable effects of deafness and use of a visuo-spatial language on far peripheral visual processing, we investigated visual reaction times (RTs) and response accuracy to visual stimuli, between 30◦ and 85◦ along the four cardinal and four inter-cardinal meridians. We used three luminances of static, briefly illuminated stimuli in visually normal adults. The cohort tested included profoundly congenitally deaf adults (N = 17), hearing fluent BSL users (N = 8) and hearing non-signing adults (N = 18). All participants were tested using a peripheral forced choice paradigm designed previously to test deaf and hearing children (Codina et al., 2011a). Deaf adults demonstrated significantly faster RTs to all far peripheral stimuli and exceeded the abilities of both signing and non-signing hearing adults. Deaf adults were significantly faster than BSL interpreters, who in turn were significantly faster than hearing non-signing adults. The differences in RT demonstrated between groups were consistent across all visual field meridians and were not localized to any one region of the visual field. There were no differences found between any groups in accuracy of detecting these static stimuli at any retinal location. Early onset auditory deprivation appears to lead to a response time visual advantage in far peripheral responses to briefly presented, static LED stimuli, especially in the right visual field. Fluency in BSL facilitates faster visuo-motor responses in the peripheral visual field, but to a lesser extent than congenital, profound deafness

Sign Language Recognition

This chapter covers the key aspects of sign-language recognition (SLR), starting with a brief introduction to the motivations and requirements, followed by a précis of sign linguistics and their impact on the field. The types of data available and the relative merits are explored allowing examination of the features which can be extracted. Classifying the manual aspects of sign (similar to gestures) is then discussed from a tracking and non-tracking viewpoint before summarising some of the approaches to the non-manual aspects of sign languages. Methods for combining the sign classification results into full SLR are given showing the progression towards speech recognition techniques and the further adaptations required for the sign specific case. Finally the current frontiers are discussed and the recent research presented. This covers the task of continuous sign recognition, the work towards true signer independence, how to effectively combine the different modalities of sign, making use of the current linguistic research and adapting to larger more noisy data set

Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 The Codes of Practice and deaf people

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:q93/18448 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Survey of deaf people's health habits BDA Health Promotion Services report

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:f99/1941 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

BSL - Britain's fourth language The case for official recognition for British Sign Language

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:1871.608(1987) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

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SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:m00/12946 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Guidelines for hearing assessment of children with complex needs

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:98/12907 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Guide to provision for deaf students in higher education

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