A Feast for the Eyes: ASL Literacy and ASL Literature

Christie, Karen; Wilkins, Dorothy M.

doi:10.1093/oxfordjournals.deafed.a014310

Cited by 15 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Further, the advent of the movie camera made possible the compilation of the literary traditions and even the canon of ASL in a way not previously possible. ASL does, then, have a well-developed literature, albeit one not easily reducible to a written form, that is now both accessible (through the productions of the National Theatre of the Deaf and other groups) and worthy of serious study (see Christie & Wilkins, 1997;Peters, 2000;Valli, 1990). As for the visual and dramatic arts, again, the Deaf culture has been remarkably prolific, especially given the resistance to Deaf identity that has been common through most of history (see, for example, Bragg, 1996;Corrado, 1990;Lane et al, 1996, pp.…”

Section: Literary and Artistic Traditionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Justice, Audism, and the d/Deaf: Rethinking Linguistic and Cultural Differences

Reagan

2020

Handbook on Promoting Social Justice in Education

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In this chapter, it will be argued that there are two fundamentally different ways in which deafness can be conceptualized: as a pathological medical condition (deafness) and as a distinctive linguistic, cultural, and social identity (Deafness). The characteristics and attributes of the Deaf cultural community (called the DEAF-WORLD in American Sign Language) will be explored: the role and place of its vernacular language (ASL), the awareness of group identity shared by its members, its distinctive behavioral norms, its endogamous marital patterns, the cultural artifacts that are most closely associated with it, its shared, insider

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Section: Literary and Artistic Traditionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Justice, Audism, and the d/Deaf: Rethinking Linguistic and Cultural Differences

Reagan

2020

Handbook on Promoting Social Justice in Education

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“…We define an ASL text as a composition expressed in ASL that is used to communicate information to others (Christie and Wilkins, 1997;Byrne, 2015). Although typically ASL is ephemeral, in the way that spoken language "disappears" once it is produced, signers can also of course record their own productions.…”

Section: Asl Textsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Development and Evaluation of a New ASL Text Comprehension Task

et al. 2020

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Being able to comprehend a language entails not only mastery of its syntax, lexicon, or phonology, but also the ability to use language to construct meaning, draw inferences, and make connections to world knowledge. However, most available assessments of American Sign Language (ASL) focus on mastery of lower level skills, and as a result little is known about development of higher-order ASL comprehension skills. In this paper, we introduce the American Sign Language Text Comprehension Task (ASL-CMP), a new assessment tool to measure ASL text comprehension ability in deaf children. We first administered the task to a group of deaf children with deaf parents (n = 105, ages 8-18 years) in order to evaluate the reliability and validity of the task, and to develop norms. We found that the ASL-CMP has acceptable levels of internal consistency, difficulty, and discriminability. Next, we administered the task to an additional group of deaf children with hearing parents (n = 251, ages 8-18 years), and found that the ASL-CMP is sensitive to expected patterns: older children have better ASL text comprehension skills, literal questions are generally easier to answer than inferential questions, and children with early exposure to ASL generally outperform those with delayed exposure. We conclude that the ASL-CMP task is reliable and valid and can be used to characterize ASL text comprehension skills in deaf children.

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“…These values, known as Deaf culture, make up the social beliefs, behaviors, history, and shared institutions shaped by the experience of being deaf and using ASL (Lane, Hoffmeister and Bahan 1996). A strong tradition of deaf art (Sonnenstrahl 2002), literature (Christie and Wilkins 1997;Harmon and Nelson 2012), poetry (Bauman 2003), folklore (Rutherford 1993), and storytelling (Erting et al 1996;Winston 1999) emerged as means to both repeat and reconstruct the deaf experience and teach the "wisdom of the group" to one another (Padden and Humphries 1988: 38).…”

Section: Ethnographic Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emmorey_Nicodemus_OGrady_Lang_of_Perception_ASL_Chapter

Emmorey¹

2019

Preprint

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We investigated linguistic codability for sensory information (colour, taste, shape, touch, taste, smell, and sound) and the use of iconic labels in American Sign Language (ASL) by deaf native signers. Colour was highly codable in ASL, but few iconic labels were produced. Shape labels were highly iconic (lexical signs and classifier constructions), and touch descriptions relied on iconic classifier constructions that depicted the shape of the tactile source object. Lexical taste-specific signs also exhibited iconic properties (articulated near the mouth), but taste codability was relatively low. No smell-specific lexical signs were elicited (all descriptions were source-based). Descriptions of sound stimuli were elicited through tactile vibrations and were often described using classifier constructions that visually depicted different sound qualities. Results indicated that iconicity of linguistic forms was not constant across the senses; rather, iconicity was most frequently observed for shape, touch, and sound stimuli, and least frequently for colour and smell.

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A Feast for the Eyes: ASL Literacy and ASL Literature

Cited by 15 publications

References 8 publications

Social Justice, Audism, and the d/Deaf: Rethinking Linguistic and Cultural Differences

Social Justice, Audism, and the d/Deaf: Rethinking Linguistic and Cultural Differences

The Development and Evaluation of a New ASL Text Comprehension Task

Emmorey_Nicodemus_OGrady_Lang_of_Perception_ASL_Chapter

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