Academic literature on the topic 'Native deaf signers'

This chapter highlights the linguistic study of Native American signed language varieties, which are broadly referred to as American Indian Sign Language (AISL). It describes how indigenous sign language serves as an alternative to spoken language, how it is acquired as a first or second language, and how it is used both among deaf and hearing tribal members and internationally as a type of signed lingua franca. It discusses the first fieldwork carried out in over fifty years to focus on the linguistic status of AISL, which is considered an endangered language variety but is still used and lea

North Korean Foreign Policy: Security Dilemma and Succession, by Yongho Kim, starts from the point of view that North Korea's provocations have been motivated more by fear than by her in-born provocative nature. Kim argues that North Korea's provocative foreign policy reflects its threat perception stemming from various security dilemma, and a very real concern regarding another father-to-son succession. This volume views North Korea's external and domestic threats as causes and its provocative foreign policy as an effect of the causes. The security dilemma has impelled North Korea to generate

Fifty-one essays and over 90 maps tell the story of how each of the 50 states in the Union became part of, and remained, one nation, indivisible, over a span of 172 years. From Delaware's entry in 1787 through Hawaii's joining in 1959,The Uniting Statesbrings together the unique stories of each of the 50 United States' journey into statehood in a single reference work. Local, national, and international matters loom large in this unique look at America's continent-spanning transformation from isolated English colonies to 50 distinct states. From Delaware's entry in 1787 through Hawaii's joinin

This chapter discusses the preparatory work of creating a collection of corpora, together functioning as a multifaceted corpus of the same sign language, across three data subsets of signing in different modalities and on different learning levels, namely visual signing (deaf/hard-of-hearing/CODA), tactile signing (deafblind), and L2 signing (hearing second-language learners). This work, led by native signers and based on personal experiences in the research field, involved planning and adapting data collection and annotation of the Swedish Sign Language corpora over time to ensure a corpus infrastructure that is uniform across data sets, compatible with a parallel lexical database, and available as a searchable resource for the public.

AbstractThe paper considers narratives as dynamic memory banks and shifts understanding from emphasizing the origins of the present to the emergence of the present. In the construction of reality, imagined futures articulate with knowledge obtained in the past.In another inversion, rather than explain change and consider stability as the norm, it focuses on change as the norm and investigates the creation of stability to explain, for example, why our societies are so slow in acting on climate change.The creation of meaning is the result of an interaction between thinking and experience, like the interaction between a map and the territory it represents. It reduces the complexity of the territory to the simplicity of the map, shaping simultaneously the cognitive map and the territory it represents. Such cognitive structures evolve into dense networks of cognitive dimensions.Tipping points emerge as a particular cognitive structure is no longer enabling a society to deal with its changing environment because it does not fully trace the logical and functional nature of the relationship between the two. To facilitate that, we need to understanding noise as signals for which no interpretative conceptual and cognitive structure has yet been identified.

AbstractMost of Eriksen’s research over the years has somehow or other dealt with the local implications of globalization. He has looked at ethnic dynamics, the challenges of forging national identities, creolization and cosmopolitanism, the legacies of plantation societies and, more recently, climate change in the era of ‘accelerated acceleration’. Here we want to talk not just about cultural diversity and not just look at biological diversity, but both, because he believes that there are some important pattern resemblances between biological and cultural diversity. And many of the same forces militate against that and threaten to create a flattened world with less diversity, less difference. And, obviously, there is a concern for the future. We need to have an open ended future with different options, maximum flexibility and the current situation with more homogenization. We live in a time when there are important events taking place, too, from climate change to environmental destruction, and we need to do something about that. In order to show options and possibilities for the future, we have to focus on diversity because complex problems need diverse answers.Martina: I would like to start with a passion of mine to get into one of your main research themes: diversity. I’m a Marvel fan and, what is emerging, is a reduction of what Marvel has always been about: diversity in comics. There seems to be a standardization that reduces the specificity of each superhero and so it seems that everyone is the same in a kind of indifference of difference. So in this hyper-diversity, I think there is also a reduction of diversity. Do you see something similar in your studies as well?Thomas: It’s a great example, and it could be useful to look briefly at the history of thought about diversity and the way in which it’s suddenly come onto the agenda in a huge way. If you take a look at the number of journal articles about diversity and related concepts, the result is stunning. Before 1990, the concept was not much used. In the last 30 years or so, it’s positively exploded. You now find massive research on biodiversity, cultural diversity, agro-biodiversity, biocultural diversity, indigenous diversity and so on. You’ll also notice that the growth curve has this ‘overheating shape’ indicating exponential growth in the use of the terms. And why is this? Well, I think this has something to do with what Hegel described when he said that ‘the owl of Minerva flies at dusk,’ which is to say that it is only when a phenomenon is being threatened or even gone that it catches widespread attention. Regarding diversity, we may be witnessing this mechanism. The extreme interest in diversity talk since around 1990 is largely a result of its loss which became increasingly noticeable since the beginning of the overheating years in the early 1990s. So many things happened at the same time, more or less. I was just reminded yesterday of the fact that Nelson Mandela was released almost exactly a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. There were many major events taking place, seemingly independently of each other, in different parts of the world. This has something to do with what you’re talking about, because yes, I think you’re right, there has been a reduction of many kinds of diversity.So when we speak of superdiversity, which we do sometimes in migration studies (Vertovec, 2023), we’re really mainly talking about people who are diverse in the same ways, or rather people who are diverse in compatible ways. They all fit into the template of modernity. So the big paradox here of identity politics is that it expresses similarity more than difference. It’s not really about cultural difference because they rely on a shared language for talking about cultural difference. So in other words, in order to show how different you are from everybody else, you first have to become quite similar. Otherwise, there is a real risk that we’d end up like Ludwig Wittgenstein’s lion. In Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein, 1983), he remarks that if a lion could talk, we wouldn’t understand what it was saying. Lévi-Strauss actually says something similar in Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss, 1976) where he describes meeting an Amazonian people, I think it was the Nambikwara, who are so close that he could touch them, and yet it is as though there were a glass wall between them. That’s real diversity. It’s different in a way that makes translation difficult. And it’s another world. It’s a different ontology.These days, I’m reading a book by Leslie Bank and Nellie Sharpley about the Coronavirus pandemic in South Africa (Bank & Sharpley, 2022), and there are rural communities in the Eastern Cape which don’t trust biomedicine, so many refuse vaccinations. They resist it. They don’t trust it. Perhaps they trust traditional remedies slightly more. This was and is the situation with HIV-AIDS as well. This is a kind of diversity which is understandable and translateable, yet fundamental. You know, there are really different ways in which we see the Cosmos and the universe. So if you take the Marvel films, they’ve really sort of renovated and renewed the superhero phenomenon, which was almost dead when they began to revive it. As a kid around 1970, I was an avid reader of Superman and Batman. I also read a lot of Donald Duck and incidentally, a passion for i paperi and the Donald/Paperino universe is one curious commonality between Italy and Norway. Anyway, with the superheroes, everybody was very white. They represented a the white, conservative version of America. In the renewed Marvel universe, there are lots of literally very strong women, who are independent agents and not just pretty appendages to the men as they had often been in the past. You also had people with different cultural and racial identities. The Black Panther of Wakanda and all the mythology which went with it are very popular in many African countries. It’s huge in Nigeria, for example, and seems to add to the existing diversity. But then again, as we were saying and as you observed, these characters are diverse in comparable within a uniform framework, a pretty rigid cultural grammar which presupposes individualism: there are no very deep cultural differences in the way they see the world. So that’s the new kind of diversity, which really consists more of talking about diversity than being diverse. I should add that the superdiversity perspective is very useful, and I have often drawn on it myself in research on cultural complexity. But it remains framed within the language of modernity.Martina: What you just said makes me think of contradictory dimensions that are, however, held together by the same gaze. How is it that your approach helps hold together processes that nevertheless tell us the same thing about the concept of diversity?Thomas: When we talk about diversity, it may be fruitful to look at it from a different angle. We could look at traditional knowledge and bodily skills among indigenous peoples, for example, and ideas about nature and the afterlife. Typically, some would immediately object that this is wrong and we are right and they should learn science and should go to school, period. But that’s not the point when we approach them as scholars, because then we try to understand their worlds from within and you realize that this world is experienced and perceived in ways which are quite different from ours. One of the big debates in anthropology for a number of years now has concerned the relationship between culture and nature after Lévi-Strauss, the greatest anthropological theorist of the last century. His view was that all cultures have a clear distinction between culture and nature, which is allegedly a universal way of creating order. This view has been challenged by people who have done serious ethnographic work on the issue, from my Oslo colleague Signe Howell’s work in Malaysia to studies in Melanesia, but perhaps mainly in the Amazon, where anthropologists argue that there are many ways of conceptualising the relationship between humans and everything else. Many of these world-views are quite ecological in character. They see us as participants in the same universe as other animals, plants and even rocks and rivers, and might point out that ‘the land does not belong to us – we belong to the land’. That makes for a very different relationship to nature than the predatory, exploitative form typical of capitalist modernity. In other words, in these cultural worlds, there is no clear boundary between us humans and non-humans. If you go in that direction, you will discover that in fact, cultural diversity is about much more than giving rights to minorities and celebrating National Day in different ethnic costumes, or even establishing religious tolerance. That way of talking about diversity is useful, but it should not detract attention from deeper and older forms of diversity.

Deaf sign language speakers are at risk for mental and physical illnesses but are often under-represented in research. Reasons include language barriers, poor literacy, and mistrust. Researchers may provide surveys in sign language to accommodate Deaf people by using their preferred language. However, sign language surveys are time consuming and may not be preferred among all Deaf individuals. In this study, we invited Norwegian and Norwegian Sign Language (NSL) speakers from the deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) population to respond to an online mental health survey. Respondents were free to choose between two versions: A standard text version and a version additionally including videos in Norwegian Sign Language (NSL). In total 783 individuals with a self-reported hearing loss responded. A significantly higher proportion of those completing the NSL-version (n = 113, 14%) were deaf, had a congenital hearing loss, knew NSL well, considered NSL their first language, and preferred it daily. However, among Deaf signers (n = 236), only one third chose the NSL-version (n = 74). Deaf signers choosing the NSL-version had lower educational attainment and reported NSL as their native language. Deaf signers choosing the text version were more often native bilingual (Norwegian and NSL). Our results indicate that while Deaf respondents preferred NSL in their daily lives, most respondents still chose a conventional text survey. Efficiency and literacy likely influenced respondents’ choice. To increase participation and improve user experience, there is a need for more research on how to better accommodate most Deaf individuals in research.

Japanese Sign Language (JSL or Nihon Shuwa) is an indigenous language of deaf people in Japan. It has regional dialects, generational and stylistic varieties. The lexico-grammatical structure of JSL shares similarities—and some mutual intelligibility—with the sign languages of Taiwan and Korea. JSL developed when deaf people started to form communities following the establishment of deaf schools in Japan in the 1880s. However, the use of sign language was not approved in deaf schools until the 1980s. In 2016, 31,000 persons out of 341,000 persons with hearing disabilities in Japan used signed language for daily communication. There are numerous non-deaf users of JSL as a first language, such as children of deaf adults (CODA). With the increase in the number of people undergoing cochlear implantation, the number of students in deaf schools is decreasing along with the number of native JSL signers.

This study aims to explore the occurrence of mouthings on information focus and contrastive focus in Italian Sign Language, showing that mouthings may be used as a focus marking strategy. Two elicitation tasks allowed us to compare the length of mouthings on focalised and non-focalised elements in the production of two Deaf native signers. Moreover, this measure was observed depending on the focus type and the syntactic role of the focalised DP. By adopting a cross-modal theoretical approach, this work provides evidence of a similar pragmatic function performed by coverbal gestures and mouthings in spoken and sign languages, respectively.

Deaf students commonly leave high school with no higher than a fourth-grade reading level. This commonality may prompt certain assumptions regarding deaf children's strengths and weaknesses, particularly relating to reading development as well as broader academic and professional endeavors. The following review examines reading development among deaf, native sign language users as a bilingual process. Specifically, four common assumptions surrounding deaf learners' potential for ASL-English bilingual development are addressed including those relating to phonological accessibility, English-based signed system efficacy, ASL-English transference of language proficiency, and strategies for emergent literacy development in young, deaf learners. Finally, suggestions for future research endeavors are posed by the author.

Communication across languages, particularly between deaf and hearing individuals, presents significant challenges. Traditional translation tools, while helpful, often fail to fully address the diverse needs of these users. This paper introduces Figure Out, a mobile application designed to provide real-time translations of text captured from images. By utilizing advanced optical character recognition (OCR), Figure Out translates written text into multiple formats—audio, text, and sign language—making it particularly accessible for individuals with hearing impairments. The app’s key advantage i

Recently, there has been a great deal of interest in light scattered by host droplets containing inclusions.1-5 One characteristic of such a system is a fluctuation in the scattered intensity. The nature of these fluctuations is not clear. They have been attributed to inclusions passing through regions of strong and weak electric fields within the host, like the hot-spot,1 and also to interference of the individual inclusions contained within the host droplet.4,5 The latter attributions of the scatter were used in previous photon-correlation analyses to determine the characteristics of the inc

The miniaturization of integrated circuit elements by scaling in very large scale integrated circuits (VLSI) has created a great deal of interest in the timing skew associated with transmitting signals via circuit lines to remote locations on a chip. As device sizes decrease and chip sizes increase with technological advances, the speed of the circuits on a VLSI chip becomes limited by signal transmission delays rather than device switching delays. Of particular interest is the clock signal that allows the system operations to be timed synchronously with one another. Parasitic transmission lin

During the past twenty years there have been rapid developments in the creation and application of mathematical computer-based capabilities and tools (e.g., FEA) to simulate and synthesize vehicle systems. This has led to the concept of virtual product development. In parallel with the development of these tools, an equally sophisticated set of tools have been developed in the area of advanced signal processing. These tools, based upon mathematical and statistical modeling techniques, enable the extraction of useful information from data and have application throughout the entire vehicle creat

Energy harvesting (EH), which scavenges electric power from ambient, otherwise wasted, energy sources, has received considerable attention for the purpose of powering wireless sensor networks and low-power electronics. Among ambient energy sources, widely available vibration energy can be converted into electrical energy using piezoelectric materials that generate an electrical potential in response to applied mechanical stress. As a basis for designing a piezoelectric energy harvester, an analytical model should be developed to estimate electric power under a given vibration condition. Many a

The increasing request for pollutant emissions reduction spawned a great deal of research in the field of combustion control and monitoring. As a matter of fact, newly developed low temperature combustion strategies for Diesel engines allow obtaining a significant reduction both in particulate matter and NOx emissions, combining the use of high EGR rates with a proper injection strategy. Unfortunately, due to their nature, these innovative combustion strategies are very sensitive to in-cylinder thermal conditions. Therefore, in order to obtain a stable combustion, a closed-loop combustion cont

Magnetic bearings are an exciting and innovative technology that has seen considerable advances in recent years. Being unstable by nature, these systems require active control. Most often linear techniques are used very successfully. On the other hand, there are applications where linear methods have limited effectiveness. Fuzzy logic control performs very well in nonlinear control situations where the plant parameters are either partially or mostly unidentified. Its effectiveness for nonlinear systems also offers advantages to magnetic bearing systems. Type-2 fuzzy logic systems represent sig

The paper’s author pays his attention to two key trends of our time. There are the development of processes of globalization and the formation of the total digitalization. So we deal with the question of the correlation of these trends, their interdependence and determinism, the completeness of the content of the described concepts’ data. The post-industrial type of social development and the followed informational and digital structure have the necessary set of signs of globalization, i.e. they are social structures of a global nature. The author substantiates the thesis that post-industrial

Rotordynamic instability, commonly observed as subsynchronous vibration, is a serious problem that can cause heavy damage to a turbomachine or make it incapable of operation due to high vibration levels. However, all subsynchronous vibrations are not necessarily unstable. If the amplitude of the subsynchronous vibration is large, it can cause damage to seals, bearings, or process wheels. If it is small, the question arises as to whether it has the potential to grow larger (“instability”) or whether it is benign and harmless. A way to know would be helpful. The objective of this study is to sig