Sign Language and Gesture Lab

Research

 

Our members investigate sign language and gesture in Deaf and hearing populations. Our research is highly regarded internationally and is funded by a number of different organisations. Two members of the team, Wolfgang Mann and Chloe Marshall, have won a City University Research prize for their research.

 

Staff supervise PhD, MSc and BSc dissertations, and are happy to discuss ideas with potential students.

 

Some of our current work is described below. Please follow these links:

Atypical sign language development in Deaf children

Non-sign repetition in Deaf and hearing children

Sign language and working memory in Deaf children

Developing a web-based BSL vocabulary test

Sign segmentation

The impact of aphasia on gesture production and comprehension

 

Atypical sign language development in Deaf children   

(Kathryn Rowley, Katherine Mason, Chloe Marshall, Ros Herman and Gary Morgan, with Bencie Woll and Joanna Atkinson (DCAL, UCL), funded by the ESRC)

Approximately 7% of hearing children have Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Hearing loss is an exclusionary criterion for SLI, so Deaf children whose first language is a signed language are typically excluded. Yet, children exposed early to signed language progress through the same developmental language stages as hearing children exposed to spoken language. Ours is the first study to document SLI in Deaf children who sign. We are investigating the language skills of approximately 20 7-14 year-olds, exposed to BSL from an early age, who have normal non-verbal cognitive development but who are not developing sign language at the same rate as their classroom peers. 


The results have the potential to further our understanding of the casues of SLI. While speech is characterized by rapid temporal changes, sign languages have a greater degree of simultaneity in how linguistic elements are used. These differences in the way language is processed allow us to investigate whether SLI is caused by a sensory processing deficit or a language-specific deficit. 

 

A further, and very important, aim of the project is to develop language assessments for BSL, and to devise therapeutic interventions for Deaf children with SLI.

 

We have been presenting this work at national and international conferences, and the first publication from this project is the following:

  • Mason, K., Rowley, K., Marshall, C. R., Atkinson, J. R., Herman, R., Woll, B. & Morgan, G. (in press). Identifying SLI in Deaf children acquiring British Sign Language: Implications for theory and practice. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 28, 33-49. 

 

 

Non-sign repetition in Deaf and hearing children   

(Wolfgang Mann, Chloe Marshall, Katie Mason and Gary Morgan, funded by the ESRC)

We have devised a non-sign repetition task in order to examine Deaf children's acquisition of sign language phonology. Children are presented with a number of nonsense signs (i.e. signs that do not exist in BSL but could be possible BSL signs) that they are asked to repeat. We have also used this task with hearing children, to see how much of it can be done just purely through copying what they presumbably see as 'gestures'.

 

We are interested in how deaf children acquire the phonological parameters of hand shape, movement, orientation, and location. We are also interested in the relationship between children's phonological skills, other aspects of their language (such as grammar and word-learning), and memory, and hope that this task will help identify Deaf children whose sign language is developing more slowly than would be expected.  

 

Publications arising from this project are:

  • Mann, W. & Marshall, C. R. (in press). Building an Assessment Use Argument for sign language: The BSL Nonsense Sign Repetition Test. Special issue of the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, on Deafness and Bilingualism and Education.
  • Mann, W., Marshall, C. R., Mason, K. & Morgan, G. (in press). The acquisition of sign language : The impact of phonetic complexity on phonology. Language Learning and Development, 6, 60-86.
  • Marshall, C. R., Denmark, T. & Morgan, G. (2006). Investigating the underlying causes of SLI: A non-sign repetition test in British Sign Language. Advances in Speech-Language Pathology, 8, 347-355.

 

Sign language and working memory in Deaf children   

(Chloe Marshall, funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship)

This project focuses on the relationship between language and working memory in children who are deaf and acquiring British Sign Language (BSL) as their native language. Chloe is using existing tests of language and working memory, and developing new ones, to investigate:

  • How much variation in BSL skills in typically developing deaf children can be accounted for by variation in phonological and visuo-spatial working memory skills?
  • Are working memory skills impaired in deaf children with atypical sign language development?
  • For both groups of children, what is the relationship between working memory abilities and the use of complex linguistic constructions?

In the course of developing the BSL tests for children, Chloe has become interested in how hearing adults learn BSL, and in particular how their visuo-spatial and gestural abilities help them to break into language in the visuo-gestural modality.

 

Developing a web-based British Sign Language vocabulary test   

(Wolfgang Mann, funded by a City University Research Fellowship)

Wolfgang has just started a two-year research project which involves the assessment of language skills in young deaf children. He will focus on the development of a Vocabulary Test for British Sign Language for deaf children within the 3-13 years age range. Currently, there are no such tests available in the UK. One of the key objectives of the project will include designing the test in a web-based format and explore the advantages of remote testing. The project will be carried out in close collaboration with schools/service units for deaf children in the UK.

 

Sign segmentation   

(Eleni Orfanidou, Robert Adam and Gary Morgan, funded by the ESRC)

This project aims to understand how Deaf people, when they sign or watch signing, are able to understand meanings through picking out signs from a continuous sign stream. Learning to sign, as learning to speak a language, is a complex process and is the end result of many factors working together. This project aims to understand which parts of the sign (e.g. the handshape or the movement of the sign) are important when people learn sign language.

 

A further aim of the project is to find out when is the best age for people to learn sign language. This is important because the majority of deaf adults are not native users of a sign language because less than one in ten deaf children are born to deaf parents. This means that many deaf children, in contrast to hearing children, are exposed to sign language, their first language, in late childhood. This aspect of the project will be important for designing courses for children or adults learning BSL.

 

The first paper arising from this project has just been published, as:

  • Orfanidou, E., Adam, R.  McQueen, J., & Morgan, G. (2009). Making sense of nonsense in British Sign Language (BSL): The contribution of different phonological parameters to sign recognition. Journal of Memory and Cognition, 37, 302-315.

 

The impact of aphasia on gesture production and comprehension   

(Naomi Cocks, Lucy Dipper and Gary Morgan, with Sotaro Kita (Birmingham))

Many people who have strokes have difficulty talking, reading, writing and understanding speech. This condition is called ‘aphasia’. Speech and language therapists often encourage carers to use gesture alongside their speech to help people with aphasia understand what is being said to them. They also encourage people with aphasia to use gesture as a means of communicating or alongside their speech to help them access words. These gestures that are produced alongside speech are called ‘co-speech gestures’. Despite speech and language therapists frequently encouraging people to use gestures, there is very little scientific evidence that people with aphasia can always understand co-speech gesture or that co-speech gesture remains unaffected by aphasia. 

 

We have devised an assessment tool to determine whether people with aphasia can integrate information that is produced through co-speech gesture with information that is produced through speech. 

 

We are also interested in whether people with aphasia actually produce different types of co-speech gestures to control participants. The findings will tell us how this important aspect of human communication is organised, processed and represented in the brain and will also influence the therapy that is given to people with aphasia. 

 

A first paper has been published:

  • Cocks, N., Sautin, L., Kita, S., Morgan, G., & Zlotowitz, S. (2009). Gesture and speech integration: An exploratory study of a man with aphasia. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 44, 795-804.