American Sign Language

Sign language is a kind of language which is primary used for the deaf and hard of hearing and also used for those who are unable to physically speak. Sign language is only understood by a small percentage of the population. There is a huge communication gap between the deaf community and the hearing majority but it is not acceptable for a nation. Computerized sign language recognition capabilities attempt to break through this communication gap. Due to the advancement of technology, Artificial Intelligence has made human life easier by using various machine learning techniques. Computer vision is one of the most vital fields of artificial intelligence. However, utilizing computer vision to recognize American Sign Language is extremely difficult since sign language is extremely complicated and has a large inter-class variation. In the last few years, Convolutional Neural Network has become an effective way for the classification of multiclass images. In this paper, we have used Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for the recognition of ASL alphabets. In this study, we have used the Sign Language MNIST dataset which consists of 34627 images where 27,455 training samples and 7172 testing data. The dataset includes 24 alphabets except for the letter J and Z among 26 alphabets. For the recognition of ASL alphabets, at first, we pre-processed our dataset by the normalization technique. After that, we designed a convolutional neural network architecture for extracting features from hand gesture images and then we trained our CNN model through the training dataset. We have finally evaluated our proposed CNN model based on the test dataset and obtained its accuracy to see that how many ASL alphabets recognize correctly. The proposed CNN architecture was able to achieve an accuracy of 99.78% on unseen data.

Cerebral organization during sentence processing in English and in American Sign Language (ASL) was characterized by employing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at 4 T. Effects of deafness, age of language acquisition, and bilingualism were assessed by comparing results from (i) normally hearing, monolingual, native speakers of English, (ii) congenitally, genetically deaf, native signers of ASL who learned English late and through the visual modality, and (iii) normally hearing bilinguals who were native signers of ASL and speakers of English. All groups, hearing and deaf, processing their native language, English or ASL, displayed strong and repeated activation within classical language areas of the left hemisphere. Deaf subjects reading English did not display activation in these regions. These results suggest that the early acquisition of a natural language is important in the expression of the strong bias for these areas to mediate language, independently of the form of the language. In addition, native signers, hearing and deaf, displayed extensive activation of homologous areas within the right hemisphere, indicating that the specific processing requirements of the language also in part determine the organization of the language systems of the brain.

Bilingualism is common throughout the world, and bilingual children regularly develop into fluently bilingual adults. In contrast, children with cochlear implants (CIs) are frequently encouraged to focus on a spoken language to the exclusion of sign language. Here, we investigate the spoken English language skills of 5 children with CIs who also have deaf signing parents, and so receive exposure to a full natural sign language (American Sign Language, ASL) from birth, in addition to spoken English after implantation. We compare their language skills with hearing ASL/English bilingual children of deaf parents. Our results show comparable English scores for the CI and hearing groups on a variety of standardized language measures, exceeding previously reported scores for children with CIs with the same age of implantation and years of CI use. We conclude that natural sign language input does no harm and may mitigate negative effects of early auditory deprivation for spoken language development.

In this paper we present a framework for recognizing American Sign Language (ASL). The main challenges in developing scalable recognition systems are to devise the basic building blocks from which to build up the signs, and to handle simultaneous events, such as signs where both the hand moves and the handshape changes. The latter challenge is particularly thorny, because a naive approach to handling them can quickly result in a combinatorial explosion. We loosely follow the Movement-Hold model to devise a breakdown of the signs into their constituent phonemes, which provide the fundamental building blocks. We also show how to integrate the handshape into this breakdown, and discuss what handshape representation works best. To handle simultaneous events, we split up the signs into a number of channels that are independent from one another. We validate our framework in experiments with a 22-sign vocabulary and up to three channels.

About five percent of the American population suffer some degree of hearing loss while 400,000 Americans are classified as deaf. Generally given less-than-adequate education, these people are forced into the lower socioeconomic levels of society and frequently isolated from the hearing world by an inherent communication barrier that serves only to deprive them further of social interaction and elevation. The social worker called upon to counsel a deaf person often finds that the communication barrier may well be the first and foremost problem to overcome before rehabilitation of the deaf client can proceed. Unindoctrinated in the esoteric communication systems of the deaf, the social worker may ultimately realize that the services of a competent interpreter are necessary. This paper points up some of the communication problems arising in a social worker's relationship with the deaf client in the four service delivery systems highlighted in the NASW Symposium. 1) Juvenile and criminal justice: Thirty-eight states have no legal provisions to require the employment of an interpreter in court cases involving deaf persons. In addition, courts all too often press into service interpreters who may otherwise be well qualified but who have no knowledge or expertise in the peculiarities of legal interpreting. 2) Health and mental health: Adequate health and mental health opportunities are only now being afforded the deaf, but many deaf people fear to take advantage of the services offered because they have insufficient communication with the doctors and counselors. 3) Public education: The very systems that are given the responsibility of preparing deaf children for their future lives frequently deny those children their basic human rights to communicate with their natural language—American Sign Language. 4) Employment: Not only discriminated against in employment but many times rejected for job training and counseling to secure good jobs, the deaf become victims of a vicious cycle perpetuated due to a lack of proper utilization of interpreter services.

We conducted an interpretative phenomenological analysis of five counseling students' experiences collaborating with American Sign Language-interpreting students during counseling practice sessions. Themes were identified in developmental domains of counselor self-awareness, counseling relationship, and advocacy interventions. Interdisciplinary collaboration led students to address cultural deficiency models and increase multicultural competency and efforts in social justice.

The vast majority of bilingual studies involve two spoken languages. Such “unimodal” bilingualism automatically entails a severe production constraint because one cannot physically produce two spoken words or phrases at the same time. For unimodal (speech-speech) bilinguals, there is a single output channel, the vocal tract, for both languages. In contrast, for bimodal (speechsign) bilinguals, there are two output channels: the vocal tract and the hands. In addition, for unimodal bilinguals both languages are perceived by the same sensory system (audition), whereas for bimodal bilinguals one language is perceived auditorily and the other is perceived visually. In this article, we present a preliminary investigation of bimodal bilingual communication among hearing people who are native users of American Sign Language (ASL) and who are also native English speakers. First, it is important to emphasize that American Sign Language has a grammar that is independent of and quite distinct f...

A study was conducted on four-year ASL Programs where students can earn a degree in ASL at three institutions. The study consisted of a document review and interviews to determine similarities and differences between curriculum design and program implementation. Each of the programs utilized a different model for students to progress through their ASL academic career. However a lot of curriculum requirements between the programs were very similar. Similarities and differences are identified in this paper as well as bridging the gap between ASL Education and Interpreter Education which means making sure students graduate meeting expectations to enter Interpreter Education programs. A result of the study identified conflicts between existing ASL and Interpreting Programs and a model is presented to prevent this conflict when implementing ASL Studies programs.

In this chapter, we extend a usage-based theory of Construction Morphology to the analysis of sign language structure, to address two long-standing categorization problems in sign language linguistics. Sign language linguistics traditionally distinguishes monomorphemic core lexical signs from multimorphemic classifier construction signs, based on whether or not a sign form exhibits analyzable morphological structure ("the Core vs. Classifier problem"). In this tradition, core signs are retrieved from the lexicon, while classifier signs are derived productively via grammatical rules. Sign linguists are also accustomed to classifying discrete and listable aspects of sign structure as language, while aspects of signing that exhibit more holism or gradience are considered to be gesture ("the Language vs. Gesture problem"). These categories of core vs. classifier on the one hand and language vs. gesture on the other derive from a shared source: the assumption that linguistic forms are built up from discrete building blocks. Instead, we analyze multimodal usage events in terms of constructions, conventional patterns of meaning and form containing both fixed elements and variable slots and organized in a structured network. We argue that the Construction Morphology approach leads to a uniform analysis of core and classifier signs alike, without resorting to an a priori distinction between language and gesture.

Leaders of spiritual communities should support a family welcoming a deaf or hard-of-hearing child in such a way that the entire community offers the child genuine inclusion. The ideal situation for protecting mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being is to raise the child bilingually. The community leader can guide as the community participates in nourishing the child by providing information and suggestions for action. The community needs to understand deafness as primarily a condition of gaining a culture and language rather than sensory loss, so that family and others evolve from grieving the loss of their expectations of what their child's life might be like to looking forward with hope to the unique contributions that child can bring to the world.

This paper presents a usage-based, Cognitive Grammar analysis of Place as a symbolic structure in signed languages. We suggest that many signs are better viewed as constructions in which schematic or specific formal properties are extracted from usage events alongside specific or schematic meaning. We argue that pointing signs are complex constructions composed of a pointing device and a Place, each of which are symbolic structures having form and meaning. We extend our analysis to antecedent-anaphora constructions and directional verb constructions. Finally, we discuss how the usage-based approach suggests a new way of understanding the relationship between language and gesture.

This paper presents an ontology which analyzes the domain of sign language phonology based on an autosegmental model, namely, Movement-Hold model. We re-use the event-based ontology of Bird and Klein, which constructs a common understanding of the structures in "autosegmental phonology”. By extending this temporal ontology to sign language, we assign appropriate meanings to autosegmental representations, and capture both simultaneous and sequential aspects of sign language phonology via temporal relations. Overall, we construct a mechanism that checks well-formedness of signs. This event based ontology for sign language phonology and its knowledge base are implemented by using Protege editor.

Natural language processing at its core is a method to understand, process and utilize human language that helps in the development of different tools. One such field where this tool can be used for is sign language which is the primary method of communication for the impaired which usually requires a translator to interpret the meaning for those who do not have the knowledge. This paper aims to propose a method that can translate recognized signed words from ASL into proper grammatically correct English sentences with the use of different NLP techniques and parsing it into a Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG) using LALR parser. This approach uses a LTAG which is a lexicon that is organized on grammar and vocabulary of the English language and connects in a group of trees. The output matrix of words from the sign recognition is used as an input for the Parts of Speech (POS) tagger that will be parsed into the grammar tree giving a proper English sentence which will be verified by using Language Tool to check the grammar of the final sentence.

Music is beyond vital; music is deeply powerful and influential. A whisper of music has enough power to cause seismic waves to be felt throughout the world. Thus, this leads me to question: Has the cultural Deaf community been missing out on something? First, I will discuss how history reveals how powerful music is and then I will explore music in light of Deaf culture.

Nel momento in cui una persona Sorda si appresta ad imparare o approfondire, come nel caso specifico che riporterò nella mia tesi, una lingua vocale straniera è importare tenere in considerazione vari fattori: la storia personale e scolastica del discente, il suo livello di competenza nella propria L1, la motivazione che lo porta ad imparare la lingua straniera, le sue abilità linguistiche. Proprio per tutti i motivi sopra elencati, può risultare complesso lavorare sull’apprendimento di quella che può essere la seconda lingua straniera dello studente (la prima risulta essere l’italiano). Di tutti questi aspetti ho dovuto tenere conto nel momento in cui, nell’estate 2019 ho accompagnato una studentessa Sorda di 17 anni a Londra per un’esperienza di viaggio – studio della durata di quindici giorni. L’esperienza verrà riportata in questa tesi con l’obiettivo di discutere le strategie e metodologie che possono essere messe in atto per lavorare sull’apprendimento della lingua inglese con una persona Sorda. Nel primo capitolo, verrà trattato l’argomento dell’acquisizione della lingua dei segni nelle persone Sorde, l’apprendimento della lingua italiana e l’importanza della lettura e della scrittura a riguardo. Saranno poi presentati i metodi manuali a supporto dell’apprendimento dell’italiano: il Cued Speech, l’Italiano Segnato, l’Italiano Segnato Esatto e la Total Communication. Saranno forniti cenni storici fondamentali sull’educazione delle persone Sorde in Italia con l’obiettivo di dare un contesto in linea con gli argomenti che saranno trattati. Sarà quindi trattato il Congresso di Milano, la legge del 1977 per l’integrazione scolastica, la 104 ed il tema dell’abbandono scolastico da parte degli studenti con sordità. Nel secondo capitolo il focus sarà sull’apprendimento della lingua inglese per le persone Sorde attraverso una panoramica dei vari metodi e strumenti utilizzabili: quindi come può essere organizzato il lavoro in classe, la Logogenia®, il metodo MA.VI®., il Shape CodingTM, il Manually Coded English (MCE) ed il Signing Exact English (SEE). Si riporterà anche l’esperienza dell’Istituto dei Sordi di Torino che organizza corsi di lingua inglese per persone S/sorde dal 2015. Il terzo capitolo presenterà il caso di studio e la preparazione al viaggio. Si riporterà la storia scolastica della studentessa Sorda protagonista della tesi, fondamentale per capire come avremmo poi lavorato in classe, e tutta la raccolta di informazioni svolta prima della partenza volta a garantire una preparazione adeguata di fronte alle diverse situazioni che si sarebbero presentate: comunicazione con il docente, tipo di lavoro svolto in classe, scelte traduttive e socializzazione ed inclusione nel gruppo di studenti.
Il quarto capitolo, riporterà invece come si è svolto il viaggio-studio. Saranno presentate e motivate le strategie utilizzate in classe rispetto a quelle mostrate in precedenza e spazio sarà anche dato all’aspetto del rapporto fra pari. Il quinto ed ultimo, avrà l’obiettivo di riflettere sulle strategie utilizzate o meno sia durante le ore di lezione che durante i contesti di libertà e socializzazione.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, it became clear that forms of access to schools were insufficient to meeting the challenge of an airborne pathogen. The many forms of accommodation needed as a result of this pandemic have reinvigorated interest in what it might mean to consider forms of Universal Design and equity in learning situations. Such conversations, whether in the media, informal discussion, or academic publications, act as reminders that schools have yet to fully ensure that students of all capacities, languages, and other forms of difference have equitable access to information, communication, and opportunities for flourishing through learning. Such conversations, too, act as reminders that, while schools may gesture towards welcoming pluralism, they nonetheless lag on robust inclusion of all differences. This paper focuses on how schools exclude a particular group within Deaf communities that shares a set of similar beliefs, values, and practices, which is known as Deaf culture, and shares a common signed

Interpreters are often assessed, but rarely given diagnostic evaluations capable of guiding their professional development. This paper describes a diagnostic tool based on the belief that the answers to how interpreters improve can be found inside the interpreters. Guided by a respect and understanding for the difficulties of change, the interpreter and diagnostician engage in a collaborative process of dialogue and observation to discover how the interpreter would like to grow and outline a plan to make that growth a reality. By analyzing how the interpreter habitually divides his/her available energy to perform the various, simultaneous parts of the task, ineffective mental habits are discovered and remedies suggested. Finally, a comprehensive professional development plan designed to match the learning style of the individual interpreter is written. Each individual plan provides a framework for professional development that supports deep, lasting growth.

This study investigated how signed performances express musical meaning and emotions. Deaf and Hard Of Hearing (HOH) and hearing participants watched eight translated signed songs and eight signed lyrics with no influence of music. The participants rated these videos on several emotional and movement dimensions. Even though the videos did not have audible sounds, hearing participants perceived the signed songs as more musical than the signed lyrics. Deaf/HOH participants perceived both types of videos as equally musical, suggesting a different conception of what it means for movement to be musical. We also found that participants’ ratings of spatial height, vertical direction, size, tempo, and fluency related to the performer’s intended emotion and participants’ ratings of valence/arousal. For Deaf/HOH participants, accuracy at identifying emotional intentions was predicted by focusing more on facial expressions than arm movements, but the opposite pattern appeared for hearing participants. Together, these findings add to our understanding of how audience members attend to and derive meaning from different characteristics of movement in performative contexts.

In school, deaf and hard of hearing students (d/hh) are often exposed to American Sign Language (ASL) while also developing literacy skills in English. ASL does not have a written form, but is a fully accessible language to the d/hh through which it is possible to mediate understanding, draw on prior experiences, and engage critical thinking and reasoning (Allington & Johnston, 2002; Vygotsky, 1987; Wertsch, 1991). This study investigates the impact of Strategic and Interactive Writing Instruction (SIWI) on the development of signed expressive language (ASL) and written English. Our analysis demonstrates that a focus on ASL did not detract from students' writing growth in English. Instead, a focus on building ASL and written English proficiency simultaneously resulted in significant gains in both language and writing. Students who are deaf and hard of hearing (d/hh) have historically experienced significant difficulty developing literacy skills past elementary grade levels (Musselman One of the sources of challenge for d/hh students is that they are often learning to read and write in English while simultaneously developing a language 1 for communicative purposes (Clark, Gilbert, & Anderson, 2011). English is not easily acquired by d/hh students (Jackendoff, 1994), and while sign language is fully accessible to d/hh for acquisition, it is not often readily available in home environments. As such, many d/hh are language deprived due to inaccessible or impoverished language environments (Kuntz,1998). Without the use of complex language as a tool to mediate understanding of events, draw on prior experiences, and engage students in critical thinking and reasoning (Vygotsky, 1989; Wertsch, 1991), learning is severely impacted. We view development of expressive language as a necessary prerequisite to literacy achievement, and that persistent language deprivation among d/hh students is the greatest contributor to literacy struggle. Strategic and Interactive Writing Instruction (SIWI) is an instructional approach that has been linked with improvements in word-, sentence-, and discourse-level English writing

People who work in social justice professions typically work
with those who do not have a voice in the public square.
Historically, these groups have been children, the aged, those
poor and/or homeless, and the disabled, among others. This
paper shows that those who interpret for deaf people should be
classified as working in a social justice profession because its
definition pertains to what sign language interpreters do. Social
justice professions strive to give everyone a fair and equal
opportunity in life, just as other groups enjoy. Although deaf
people should be advocating for themselves, sign language
interpreters do this de facto, as they get bombarded with
questions regarding deaf people’s capabilities, get caught in the
culture debate, and observe as discrimination of the deaf person
abounds. This type of vicarious trauma can cause people in
social justice professions to burn out. One hundred sign
language interpreters were given a survey assessing their level
of grit (Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, & Kelly, 2007). The
range of grit scores (1-5) was 2.33 - 4.75 (x̅ 3.7, mode 3.33).
Interpreters were also given qualitative questions regarding
what drew them to the profession and what keeps them in the
profession. Initially, only 49 got into the profession for social
justice reasons, but now 70 interpreters listed social justice as
the reason they continue to work in the profession. They are
exhibiting what is known in the profession as ‘Deaf Heart’.
Interpreters are coming alongside deaf people in order to help
level the playing field.