It is widely assumed that sign languages are secondary semiotic phenomena that only come into being when deafness prevents the normal acquisition of a spoken language. That this is not always the case is well illustrated by the sign languages used by contemporary indigenous Australian groups (Kendon 1989), and the sign language shared by indigenous peoples of the Plains region of North America ...

objectives: profound hearing loss encounters children with delay in speech and language. as it is known language acquisition in young deaf children is a lengthy process, but cochlear implanted children have better spoken language skills than if they had not received the device. according to the importance of cochlear implant in deaf child's language development, this study evaluates the ef...

Objectives: Persian is a pro-drop language with canonical Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order. This study investigates the acquisition of word order in Persian-speaking children. Methods: In the present study, participants were 60 Persian-speaking children (30 girls and 30 boys) with typically developing language skills, and aged between 30-47 months. The 30-minute language samples were audio...

This paper describes a trilingual sign language dictionary (Japanese Sign Language and American Sign Language, and Korean Sign Language) which helps those who learn each sign language directly from their mother sign language. Our discussion covers two main points. The first describes the necessity of a trilingual dictionary. Since there is no "universal sign language" or real "international sig...

Sign language poetry is the ultimate form of aesthetic signing, in which the form of language used is as important as or even more important than the message. Like so much poetry in any language, sign language poetry is a means of expressing ideas unusually succinctly, through means of heightened "art" language. It uses specific language devices to maximise the significance of the poem, just as...

One of the problems in spoken language translation is the enormous variety o f expressions not found in text translation. This volume can lead to a sparse translation coverage. In order to tackle this problem, we take the practical approach of untangling slight variations in the source language before transferring a source expression to its target. We therefore discuss how eective paraphrasing ...

There are a lot of differences between expressions used in written language and spoken language. It is one of the reasons why speech synthesis applications are prone to produce unnatural speech. This paper represents a method of paraphrasing unsuitable expressions for spoken language into suitable ones. Those two expressions can be distinguished based on the occurrence probability in written an...

Progress in both speech and language processing has spurred efforts to support applications that rely on spoken—rather than written—language input. A key challenge in moving from text-based documents to such “spoken documents” is that spoken language lacks explicit punctuation and formatting, which can be crucial for good performance. This paper describes different levels of speech segmentation...

Most of our knowledge about the neurobiological bases of language comes from studies of spoken languages. By studying signed languages, we can determine whether what we have learnt so far is characteristic of language per se or whether it is specific to languages that are spoken and heard. Overwhelmingly, lesion and neuroimaging studies indicate that the neural systems supporting signed and spo...

Many theories of memory propose some type of shortterm store limited in capacity to a small number of information chunks. However, although short-term verbal memory is generally considered to be a crucial component of language processing, the relevant information chunk level that may define capacity limits in ecologically-valid spoken language has never been investigated. The Intonation Unit (I...