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We begin with a brief sketch of the signed language used by the Iranian Deaf community: Zaban Eshareh Irani (ZEI). Then we discuss a system that is frequently employed in signed languages—finger-spelling—which is the representation of characters in written systems by using conventionalized handshapes. Using ZEI naturalistic data, we describe a manual alphabet system (referred to as the Baghcheban phonetic alphabet in this article) that somewhat resembles Cued Speech but has features similar to those of many fingerspelling systems.

Multilingual Aspects of Signed Language Communication and Disorder, edited by David Quinto-Pozos (Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2014, 288 pp., hardcover, ISBN 978-1-78-309130-0)In the United States, children who are deaf or hard of hearing are being screened for hearing in the newborn period. This screening facilitates earlier identification of hearing status and earlier initiation of intervention services if needed. In addition, at least in some state systems, parents are offered an opportunity to learn sign language, often in the home, in the first few months of their new infant's life. Because these children are being introduced to sign language, hopefully from a native and/or fluent signer, they are able to access a competent communication in a visual language. The ability to begin to assess and diagnose communication disorders that interfere with the typical development of sign communication will become increasingly important as the field attempts to identify these disorders quickly so that appropriate interventions can be developed for these specialized subgroups.Until this text was published, the field has lacked a comprehensive discussion of the topic of communication disorders and sign language communication.The book presents a wide-ranging discussion of this topic by an illustrious group of authors who, as experts in the field, provide compelling data and case examples of atypical sign communication. This text should be a requirement for students who are preparing to provide educational services to children or adults communicating with sign language. The information in this volume provides a framework for the assessment of sign language development and communication that can be used to devise new intervention strategies for these special populations. It would be an invaluable resource for any professional working with children and adults who sign.As Karen Emmorey has pointed out, the information in this text can significantly inform theories of language development and disorders that have focused exclusively on spoken language disorders. Information about special subpopulations can provide valuable insight into variability in sign language development and language-learning processes, as well as the interactions of language, cognition, and socialemotional development.This book in the series Communication Disorders across Languages is the first to exhaustively explore communication disorders in individuals who sign. Part 1 deals with developmental language disorders in the signed modality. Topics include information about identifying (1) specific language impairment (SLI) in children who use sign language, (2) other developmental signed language disorders, (3) sign language characteristics of children who are deaf with autism, and (4) guidelines for the development of sign language assessments.Part 2 of the book deals with fluency disorders, neurogenics, and acquired communication disorders.This section discusses stuttering in signed languages, sign dysarthria in sign language, and dementia and its impact on signed languages. Part 3 of the book, which deals with the subject of hearing children from signing households, discusses KODAs (kids of deaf adults) ("a special form of bilingualism," p. 211) and bimodal/bilingual language development in ASL.It is not unreasonable to hypothesize that additional disabilities would occur at least at a rate similar to that in hearing children; they might even constitute a higher proportion because a significant percentage of children who are diagnosed as deaf or hard of hearing have spent time in the neonatal intensive care units. Thus, when considering the prevalence of specific language impairments among hearing children, as indicated by Dr. Laurence Leonard in the foreword, there are likely as many-if not more-deaf children with SLI. A study of British Sign Language and specific language impairment has found about 6.4 percent based on 13 children of a total of 203 deaf children who had atypical sign language development. …

Cuers are a socially significant category in terms of language play—they are interesting from a linguistic anthropological perspective in that respect because their performance, expressed using manual English at the phonemic level rather than the traditional spoken model, has had very limited documentation. For this reason, a study of language play in cueing addresses various questions about modality in general. In this article I am interested in seeing how cuers take advantage of the linguistic resources offered by both modalities. After a brief definition and background on Cued Speech, this article discusses spoken and signed language play and follows with a description and an analysis of various types of cued English play.

Is the right to sign language only the right to a minority language? Holding a capability (not a disability) approach, and building on the psycholinguistic literature on sign language acquisition, I make the point that this right is of a stronger nature, since only sign languages can guarantee that each deaf child will properly develop the linguistic and cognitive potentialities with whom (s)he is endowed at birth. So, the right to sign language is also the right to the integrity of the person.

Sign Bilingualism: Language Development, Interaction, and Maintenance in Sign Language Contact Situations, ed. Carolina Plaza-Pust and Esperanza Morales-Lopez (Philadelphia: Benjamins, 2008, 389 pp., hardcover, $158.00, ISBN 978-90-272-4149-8) THE EDITORS of this volume have put together twelve papers under the tide Sign Bilingualism. The papers cover a variety of topics, including code mixing in Li acquisition, language planning and its impact on interpreters, language contact in the development of writing, and the correlation between the use of space in sign language and reading comprehension. I would recommend to potential readers (and they should be numerous!) to start reading the book from the back. In the final chapter, Plaza-Pust and Morales-Lopez do an excellent job of introducing the relevant concepts of sign bilingualism, language maintenance and planning, and language contact. Drawing on previous studies in both spoken and signed languages, they show connections to the studies presented in this volume, bridge the diverse topics presented in the other eleven chapters, and demonstrate the relevance of linking theory and practice. Plaza-Pust and Morales-Lopez hope that "the knowledge that can be gleaned from each of the chapters in this volume also contributes to a more dynamic relationship between the research-policy-practice axis that determines sign bilingualism and its perception in the broader social context" (372). And indeed, the contributions to this volume illustrate the range of research on linguistic structures and their impact on language policies and also advise practitioners on putting research into practice. This "course," which is offered as dessert, in this reviewer's opinion, ought to be instead a tantalizing appetizer. The first course offering by Baker and van der Bogaerde (1-28) discusses the code mixing in the input to and the output from children. It is a significant contribution in understanding the natural interactions within families that comprise both deaf and hearing members. Their results show that deaf children receive significantly less code blending in their input from their deaf mothers and also use less in their own utterances. Differences appear in the types of code blends, with hearing children producing and receiving far more blends with Dutch as the base language, while the deaf children in the study receive and produce almost exclusively blends with NGT as their base language. Baker and van der Bogaerde also note that the most commonly blended word classes are nouns, verbs, and adjectives, results that contradict previous studies on code blending in both deaf and hearing adults (Emmorey el al. 2005; Muysken 2004). If we consider Baker and van der Bogaerde's chapter a first course, the next section of the book could serve as the main courses. As most of the contributions in this volume are concerned with bilingualism in the context of deaf education, this is the core of the book. The chapter by Ardito et al. (137-64) stands out because it discusses practical applications of bilingual education. The authors describe in great detail activities in a bilingual kindergarten class aimed at increasing appreciation of and competence in literacy. Ardito et al. give a brief but useful introduction to bilingualism and early literacy. The remainder of the chapter describes the principles, methods, and successes of team teaching reading to a mixed group of hearing and deaf children using Italian Sign Language and Signed Italian. This chapter in particular will be of interest to educators looking for concrete advice on how to put what we know about sign bilingualism into practice. Educators and researchers will appreciate Krausneker's report (195-222) on the language use and awareness of deaf and hearing children in a bilingual classroom in Austria. After situating her research within the larger context of Austrian deaf educational and societal policies, Krausneker elaborates the findings of her longitudinal study of the use of OGS and German in a mixed class of hearing and deaf students. …

I BEGIN WITH A QUESTION: What does it mean to transliterate American Sign Language (ASL) and the visual realities of a Deaf life into creative texts written in English? This question is larger than the necessities of transliteration and conventions of print. If fiction writers or poets happen to be Deaf-meaning that they consider themselves to be members of the Deaf community and use ASL as their primary language-then they must also consider how writing in English (or other print languages) displaces a cultural identity grounded in a visual-spatial language, one that has historically been denigrated, suppressed, and erased from sight. Indeed, it seems that even on the sentence level, written English resists the unsettling presence of transliteration across modalities; turn-taking in sign language cannot easily be slotted into conversation tags (e.g., he said, she said). A sign cannot be "said." In English, dialogue without quotation marks is, in effect, speechless. Without the conventionalized use of quotation marks, dialogue shirts inward and inhabits an internal territory, for without quotations, what separates thought from conversation on the page? If one uses the conventions of written English, then the results are awkward and imply a one-to-one correlation between signs and English words (e.g., "What's up?" Dave signed). Tonal dialogue tags reveal problems with trying to sequence information on the page that, for a signer, would be perceived in a simultaneous, not linear, fashion (e.g., "You should have gone to the meeting," she signed, disappointed). So, in effect, if one uses the conventions of printed English, then the story or poem embodies the hearing, not the Deaf, world. To evoke a resistant perspective, some Deaf writers and Deaf poets make use of code mixing, untranslated ASL gloss, and other hybrid forms that show the postcolonial possibilities for textualizing Deaf lives and sign language. It is important to remember that many Deaf people who are creative thinkers and innovative in their use of ASL simply do not bother with writing literary forms of English. Why should they? ASL has a long tradition of visual poetics and a rich traditional linguistic history with many genres-ASL poetry, narratives, jokes, and rap, to name just a few. With the advent of visual recording devices, ASL has its own form of "print" in that DVDs and videotapes can be watched repeatedly and disseminated to a larger audience. So, for the purposes of writing Deaf, why bother with English? It is, after all, the dreaded and always fragmented, incomplete language of speech therapy: words forced, unwieldy and thick, from mouths. There is also the uneven and sometimes humiliating experience of learning to read and write English, with its idiosyncratic orthography based, in many cases, upon phonetics. So much of English has to be heard in order to be understood and then used. As is the case with other diglossic subcultural groups, the use of written English, for many Deaf people, has been largely seen as utilitarian, a necessary tool for participation in U.S. social institutions. English is, after all, the language of government and business. More to the point, literary English and the attendant displays of hearing cultural norms do not reflect the lived, embodied realities of a Deaf person's life or sign language. Like Singer in Carson McCuIlers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the few deaf characters in literary English are most often written as metaphors for the human (i.e., hearing) condition. Historically, Deaf bodies have been pathologized, and their ears, as one specific site of conflict, have been colonized through attempts to "fix" deafness. The deafened ear, the silenced body, and endangered soul have all been mapped out by centuries of medical and religious literature. In the long campaign against sign language, Deaf people have been told to sit on their hands and speak up, have been ordered not to marry each other, and, to this day, continue to suffer the effects of an imperialist and audist directive to conform, to speak, and to not unsettle or disrupt the ongoing narratives of the hearing world. …

MANY MOVEMENTS that humans see naturally suggest something other than themselves. This is a legacy from the remotest time. Among animals, movements of prey and predator give each an indication of what may happen next and a basis for choosing their own actions. As species evolved, the movements that could be made and the meanings that could be suggested in those movements became increasingly sophisticated. Among the higher primates, grooming, aggressive and submissive displays, begging, and other movements regulate complex social interactions. Humans also interpret movements; they inform us of what others do, what happens to things, and how a movement maker feels-all this is instinctive. It has been understood for a long time that movements, gestures, among them, have semantic interpretations. The argument of these chapters, however, is that syntactic interpretation has also evolved and is also eminently natural. Humans not only make, see, and interpret movement but also discern patterns in it: "Something dropped," "That one leapt," "She took it." Movements, when they become the primary symbols of a sign language, have a syntactic structure that can represent these patterns and many others that grow out of them. Sounds can alarm, warn, beckon, threaten, and so on; but unaided by convention they cannot represent nounlike or verblike concepts. Powerless to make even this fundamental grammatical distinction, sounds have no natural, direct way to show concepts linked in the relationship called predication or syntax. Only convention can link sounds to word meanings and sentence meanings. Primary sign languages are more natural than spoken languages because a visible sign often carries a visual clue to what it signifies. For example, the meaning of "I give" reverses the meaning of "I was given." Gestured, the two meanings are clearly opposite: the former sign moves outward from the signer; "I was given" moves toward the signer (see fig. 1). But when meanings like these are spoken in English, one must know the language to understand the crucial difference between them. To a speaker or reader of English, the auxiliary was signals the difference. Using was reverses the direction of the giving, but neither the vocal sounds that compose was nor the word itself refer to the direction of transitivity. In a sign language, however, what is given goes from the giver to the receiver; no rule is needed until language becomes spoken. Humans possess an innate, clear understanding, gained early in life, that movement (of anything) toward self differs from movement away from self. Infants acquire this understanding when activity around them and their own hands and eyes and brain circuitry bring it into their ken. Later, of course, well beyond the period of infancy, they learn that a speaker's use of active or passive voice signals this basic reversal of direction, which was clear to them previously. Speakers of languages have had to come up with various devices to indicate the difference between giving and being given and the whole active/passive distinction. Signers simply make opposed movements to signal the reversal of direction. This relationship of language sign to meaning is not derived from abstract rules. We first understood the active/passive meaning difference by seeing, moving, feeling-by physical experience cognized. Observing the direction of physical actions is so simple and obvious that one may wonder why spoken languages need complex active-passive rules; but the explanation is obvious: sounds that voices make can no more directly indicate the difference between give and receive than that between to and from. As the previous chapter revealed, alternate sign languages used by hearing people may differ from primary sign languages used by those who are deaf, but whether the difference is deep-seated or only one of degree has yet to he determined. If an alternate sign language fully represents a spoken language, it is just as correct to say that the spoken language fully represents the sign language. …

Bilingualism and Identity in Deaf Communities, ed. Melanie Metzger (Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2000, 3 17 pp., casebound, $55.00) MELANIE METZGER made the right choice when she began her Bilingualism and Identity in Deaf Communities with a chapter on New Zealand name signs. The chapter is interesting and easy to identify with. Everybody has a name. The subject easily leads the reader into the other ten chapters in this volume of Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities, the sixth of a series of books published by Gallaudet University Press. Many who purchased the first collection years ago, Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities, remember the initial impact that these chapters had on bringing about increased recognition to the American Deaf community and its sociolinguistic activities. If you have not kept up with the series, you may be surprised to find the diversity of topics in the first six volumes: Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities (Ceil Lucas, editor); Multicultural Aspects of Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities (Lucas); Deaf Children in Public Schoools (Claire Ramsey); Pinky iExtension and Eye Gaze; Language Use in Deaf Communities (Lucas); Storytelling and Conversation: Discourse in Deaf Communities (Elizabeth Winston); and this volume, edited by Metzger. The first five volumes provide excellent material for understanding the mores, values, and rationale behind many actions in deaf communities throughout the United States. The volume under review provides a worldview of Deaf communities and offers contrasts and similarities of the cultural and linguistic behaviors of Deaf communities in various parts of the world. One opens the cover and realizes that the book indeed offers a global look at Deaf communities. And what an offer it is-Argentine semiotic aspects; education of Deaf children in Barcelona; New Zealand name signs; Mexican miracle cures; European Union minority language policy; Swedish tactile turn-taking; Nicaraguan search for roots; codeswitching between American Sign Language and cued speech, and more. The first chapter, "Name Signs and Identity in New Zealand Sign Language" by Rachel Locker McKee and David McKee, begins this way: "Personal names in any culture are a potential gold mine of information about social relationships, identity, history, and linguistic processes." One might assume that all names are given in similar ways-the process is so natural. But the reader finds that name bestowing in New Zealand is sometimes quite different from the practice found in, say, the United States. The authors videotaped 118 deaf people from two years to seventy years of age in three major regions of New Zealand. Since many informants had more than one name sign, the authors recorded a total of 223 name signs. Informants were asked to provide their legal name, age, the schools they attended, all the name signs they had had during their life, the date each one was acquired, and the etymology behind each name sign. Seven distinct name sign categories in New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) were discovered. Several of them are similar to American naming practices, such as acquiring new names signs when a Deaf person moves to a different community or takes on a new role in relation to a group of signers. A couple of interesting differences were noted also. In ASL descriptive name signs (those that make use of classifiers to identify a person's physical characteristics) are typically not ascribed to adults. Adult ASL users are more likely to have an arbitrary, initialized name sign than a descriptive one. In NZSL the opposite occurs. Fingerspelled initials are regarded as "a temporary and uninteresting measure, usually adopted only until a descriptive name sign evolves" (27). In fact, for deaf people over the age of fifty-one, no NZSL fmgerspelling in any of their names was found. McKee and McKee found another interesting, age-related pattern. The oldest cohort (51 + years) has the highest number of name signs that are based on their spoken names. …

Remarkably few studies have examined the outcomes of sign language interpreting. Three experiments reported here examine deaf students’ comprehension of interpreting in American Sign Language and English-based signing (transliteration) as a function of their sign language skills and preferences. In Experiments 1 and 2, groups of deaf students varying in their sign language skills viewed either an ASL or English-based interpretation of a nontechnical lecture, followed by either a written comprehension test (Experiment 1) or a signed comprehension test (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 involved a more technical (physics) lecture, separate testing of students with greater ASL or English-based sign skills and preferences, and control of students’ prior content knowledge. Results consistently demonstrate that regardless of the deaf students’ reported sign language skills and preferences, they were equally competent in comprehending ASL interpreting and English transliteration, but they gained less knowledge from lectures than hearing peers in comparison groups. The results raise questions about how much deaf students actually learn in interpreted classrooms and the link between their communication preferences and learning.

This article, part of a larger project that studied sociolinguistic variation in American Sign Language, examines that variation in a class of American Sign Language signs exemplified by the verb know, which vary in their location. Usually these signs are produced at the forehead, but frequently they are produced at a lower level. Analysis of approximately twenty-nine hundred tokens of signs of this class from more than two hundred signers in seven U.S. sites shows that the lowering of signs such as know is constrained by both linguistic and social factors that parallel variation in spoken languages. Results from signers of three different age groups also provide evidence of change in progress. Despite similarities to variation in spoken languages, results for several social factors are best explained by reference to Deaf history and to the structure of the Deaf community.

This study examines deaf children’s use of private speech from a Vygotskian perspective. In this framework private speech is speech that is spoken aloud (or by a deaf child is visibly performed) but is addressed to no one in particular. Children from two matched groups-hearing mother-deaf child and Deaf motherdeaf child-were videotaped while attempting to assemble a construction toy. Both groups of children showed clear evidence of use of private speech, although the children with Deaf mothers used a signed form, a greater frequency, and more mature subtype of private speech, in comparison to the spoken form used by the other children. Findings are consistent with Vygotsky’s notion of the robustness of the phenomenon of private speech and its ontogenesis in early social communication.

����� The years of searching in the dark for a truth that one feels but cannot express, the intense desire and the alternations of confidence and misgiving until one breaks through to the clarity and understanding are known only to him who has himself experienced them. -Einstein Speech is a wonderful capability that only our species possesses. Those who have made speech the focus of their research have added much to human understanding. But others, who seem to suppose that speech and language are two names or aspects of the same thing, have often confounded knowledge. Speech is physical-sound produced by the voice and received by the sense of hearing, but language is mental; it begins in neural activity and integrates sensory and motor systems-plus knowledge, intellect, will, desire, and much else-into thought and social interaction. Failure to see the separation between language and speech has resulted in wasted intellectual effort, because ever since the time of Aristotle, most students of speech and language have attempted to apply crisp categorical logic to something that defies such precise categorization. Speech is by nature imprecise. Not only do speakers of different languages speak differently; speakers of the same language have various ways of making the sounds of their own language. The term "dialect" labels the speech of speakers from different regions or classes or with different first languages. This kind of difference is often artistically exploited: An actor learns to speak in the dialect used by the character portrayed; a writer uses odd spelling and phrasing to represent the speech habits of a region or class. Individual speech differs at least as much as individual fingerprints. The expert impersonators on "Saturday Night Live" almost make us believe that we are listening to the prominent personality whose utterances are being turned into high comedy.

In this study we examined the effect of providing information on the etymology or origin of a sign and memory for that sign. Eightytwo subjects, undergraduate students unfamiliar with American Sign Language (ASL), were presented lists of ASL signs and their English translation equivalents in one of three experimental conditions: sign etymology supplied, sign motor rehearsal, and no coding instructions provided. Subjects were tested immediately after list presentation and again after a one-week delay for cued item recall; the ASL signs served as the cues for the English words. In immediate recall, there were only small differences across experimental conditions. In delayed recall, those subjects who received the sign etymologies remembered more sign-word pairs than the subjects in the other two conditions. Those who received the etymologies also showed smaller decrements in recall levels across the one-week delay. Apparently, learning about a sign’s origin facilitates long-term sign retention. These findings are interpreted within the framework that deeper, more distinctive, or more elaborative processing of information aids its retention.

Deaf signers use both manual and non-manual signals but do not treat either as primary in American Sign Language. Deaf student signers, however, often write English that appears to translate the manually expressed parts and omit the non-manually expressed parts of a Pidgin Sign English version of the text.

A popular but naive notion that sign lan- guage interpreters should strive for perfect temporal synchrony with the source message has persisted for a long time. This study provides evidence that imposing such a constraint or expectation upon interpreters results in inaccurate interpretation and an increase in interpreter errors or miscues. An analysis and count of miscues in actual interpreter performances has been compared with interpreters' lag time (i.e. the time between delivery of the original message and delivery of the interpreted message). The result shows an inverse relationship between the amount of lag time and the number of interpreter errors. This relationship has serious implications for interpreter educational programs, interpreter assessment programs, and programs intended to make consumers aware of interpreting's limitations. The interpretation process. Despite limited research

Abs tract . The purpose of this study was to obtain data on the developmental stages that deaf children pass through in acquiring the adult form of pronominal classifiers in American Sign Language, by obtaining data on production, comprehension, and imitation from nine children aged three to eleven years. All nine children are congeni- tally, profoundly deaf and have deaf parents. In all cases classifiers were mastered much later than would be predicted from a timetable for signs with similar structure. Evidence was found for a developmental sequence and for acquisition strategies similar to those that have been identified for hearing children learning a spoken language; e.g. handshapes that could be produced correctly in non-classifier signs were re- placed by motorically easier handshapes in classifier signs made by children in this study. It is suggested that this is the result of complexities associated with classifier usage. Ac q uisition American Sign Language (ASL), the language of ASL. used by American deaf adults among them- selves, is currently receiving much attention from linguists (e.g. Klima & Bellugi 1979, Lane & Grosjean 1980, Wilbur 1979). These extensive linguistic investigations go beyond the question whether ASL is a language; rather they begin the process of detailing its structure. The acquisition of ASL by deaf children with deaf parents occurs naturally; i.e. when ASL is provided by the child's environment it will be learned without conscious effort on the part of child or parents. This can be contrasted with the fundamentally different situation in American schools for deaf children where one of a variety of sign systems based on

Deaf children perceive signs of a sign language cheremically; i.e. they like deaf adults have more difficulty discriminating between lexical items that are minimal pairs in the language than between those that are not.

The language development of three prelingually deaf children was studied in videotapes made monthly from the time of their enrollment in a Cued Speech program. Each child’s communication was analyzed in terms of the frequency of use of gestures, cues, and speech. Length and structure of multi-unit utterances and lexical development were also documented. The data were compared with data previously obtained from the same children while enrolled in an oral education program (Mohay 1982). With the introduction of Cued Speech the frequency with which the children used commuicative gestures dropped dramaticaly without a corresponding increase in speech production. Consequently the overall frequency of their communication was depressed. There was however a slight shift towards the production of longer spoken utterances. Spoken vocabulary showed a significant increase only in the child whose rapid vocabulary acquisition had commenced before her introduction to Cued Speech. The results suggest that the introduction of Cued Speech at an early age does not materially aid the spoken language development of profoundly deaf children.

Sign-naive adults recall newly learned manual signs better if they are grouped by semantic similarity than if by phonological similarity (Mills & Weldon 1983). A paired-associates experiment was devised in which cues to the visual metaphor behind the signs were presented to see if subjects would then recall phonologically grouped signs better. In three test trials 36 hearing subjects recalled semantically grouped signs significantly better than phonologically grouped signs, whether cues were given for the latter or not. Although there was no significant difference, there was a slight improvement in recall for the visually cued over the uncued phonologically grouped signs.

Examination of American Sign Language - produced by a deaf child acquiring the language from deaf parents, and videotaped at age 13, 15, 18, and 21 months - shows conformity to many of the phonological rules operative for all languages. Active-hand configurations, i.e. dez handshapes, are learned in stages. A first-stage dez is substituted regularly for a dez of a later stage before second stage competence is reached. Rules specific to ASL dez substitution are posited.

Signed speech refers to the simultaneous production of signs and speech. When autistic children are taught to sign and speak at the same time, i.e. to use signed speech, the spontaneity that manual language promotes transfers to speech. After the children have employed signed speech for many months, the signs can be faded out. The children employ the verbal language that remains in a creative and generative fashion–to make demands, describe the world, and to direct or comment on their own behavior. The three originally nonverbal autistic boys we instructed progressed from spontaneous sign language, to spontaneous signed speech, to spontaneous verbal language.

Speech and its function were studied (1;6 to 7;5) in a deaf child with deaf signing and speaking parents. At first, before age 3, imitation of facial speech behavior, speech-readable speech, and vocal speech were attempted but little: switching modes (sign to speech; speech to sign) was used early for clarification and emphasis; English functors were spoken before they were signed. Speech behavior assumed considerable importance after age 5; new words entered the child’s lexicon through speechreading, and she learned to adjust mode to language code and to listener needs for flexible communication.