No Dummies: Deafness, Baseball, and
American Culture
This article begins by examining the historical and social factors that led to
1901 being the �deafest� year in major league baseball history with four deaf
players. In particular, the author discusses the career of William Ellsworth
�Dummy� Hoy, a deaf man from Ohio who became the most celebrated deaf player in
history and explores the reasons why he is not more celebrated in the mainstream
culture.
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Shared Thinking Processes with Four
Deaf Poets: A Window on �the Creative� in �Creative Sign Language�
This article discusses a new way of thinking about analyzing sign-language
poetry. Rather than merely focusing on the product, the method involves
observing the process of its creation. Recent years have witnessed increasing
literary and linguistic analysis of sign-language poetry, with commentaries on
texts and performances being set within and drawing on a range of disciplines
and analytical techniques. However, attention has so far been paid to the texts
and performances rather than to the process of their creation. While working
with four of the UK�s most prolific sign-language poets, exploring and trying to
understand more about British Sign Language (BSL) poetry, we became increasingly
interested in the creative processes that occur and emerge in the composition
itself. We decided to give them a task related to creative anthropomorphism and
asked them to think �out loud� about the process as they created their
compositions.
We took our lead from think-aloud protocols, which have been used extensively in
studies of cognitive processes and knowledge acquisition to understand how we
solve problems (van Someren, Barnard, and Sandberg 1994; Tirkkonen-Condit and
J��skel�inen 2000; Stone 2009). We invited the poets to reflect upon and share
with each other how they tackle a particular challenging aspect that is often
incorporated in sign-language poems. This shared thinking process enabled them
to explore anthropomorphic concepts together and jointly to create poetic
examples, while also giving us insight into the processes of task completion
(rather than only its final product).
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ASL Discourse Strategies: Chaining
and Connecting: Explaining across Audiences
This study takes advantage of a novel methodology�the use of a single
culturally-meaningful text written in English and presented to different
audiences in ASL�to examine the ways in which Deaf native signers utilize
contextualization strategies in order to match the perceived linguistic and
informational needs of an audience. We demonstrate, through close examination of
the ASL text in comparison with the English source text, that signers use
contextualization techniques (Gumper, 1982), which are discourse strategies that
support the construction of meaning. We suggest that two strategies for
supporting communication in ASL could be labeled contextualization cues:
chaining (Humphries and MacDougall 1999/2000) and what we refer to as
connecting-explaining. Both contextualization strategies appear throughout
all of the ASL texts, though connecting-explaining is much more prevalent; it
appears, on average, once every ten seconds with most audiences. This study of
contextualization contributes to our knowledge of ASL discourse strategies and
has implications for various professionals, including educators of Deaf
children, signed-language linguists, signed-language interpreters, and
interpreting educators.
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Dictionaries of African Sign Languages:
An Overview
This article gives an overview of dictionaries of African sign languages that
have been published to date most of which have not been widely distributed.
After an introduction into the field of sign language lexicography and a
discussion of some of the obstacles that authors of sign language dictionaries
face in general, I will show problems related to sign language dictionary making
in Africa in particular. In the main part of this article I show who produced
these dictionaries, why and for whom they were produced, how data was collected,
and I compare their content and their structures.
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Prosodic Correlates of Sentences in
Signed Languages: A Literature Review and Suggestions for New Types of Studies
This article contains a literature review of evidence of large prosodic domains
that correspond to syntactic units such as a clause or a sentence. In
particular, different phonetic nonmanual cues that may relate to clause or
sentence boundaries are discussed in detail. On the basis of various ideas and
views in the literature, we also describe two types of studies that may further
our understanding of prosodic domains and their relation to sentence boundaries.
The first type is a refinement of a recent series of perception studies in which
signers� intuitions are elicited on break points in stretches of discourse. The
second-type exploits new visual signal-processing techniques to detect salient
events in a video recording of signing. The article concludes with a discussion
of how knowledge of the prosody of signed languages can be employed for language
technology.
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Toward a Phonetic Representation of
Hand Configuration: The Thumb
In this article, we present a system for the representation of the
configurations of the thumb in the hand configurations of signed languages and
for the interactions of the thumb with the four fingers proper. The
configuration of the thumb is described as a componential combination of the
descriptions of thumb opposition, abduction of the CM joint, and extension of
the MCP and DIP joints. Interaction with the other fingers is described as a
relationship between specific surfaces of the thumb and specific surfaces of the
fingers involved.
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