Royal Auris Group -the Netherlands Departamento de Educação -Queensland -Australia Royal Auris Gr... more Royal Auris Group -the Netherlands Departamento de Educação -Queensland -Australia Royal Auris Group -the Netherlands Resumo: Na Holanda, a maioria das crianças surdas e com deficiência auditiva (SDA) segue a educação regular, sem instrução direta em língua de sinais. Embora as escolas para surdos possam oferecer educação bilíngue bimodal, há um movimento geral em direção a uma educação mais inclusiva. Internacionalmente, escolas regulares bilíngues bimodais (BiBi) foram criadas para fornecer instrução direta em língua de sinais para crianças surdas e ouvintes, acesso a colegas surdos e professores especializados em educar crianças SDA. Apresentamos nossos planos para a introdução de um programa BiBi em duas escolas regulares na Holanda, com base nas experiências e melhores práticas da Escola Estadual Toowong em Brisbane, Austrália. Discutiremos questões e desafios remanescentes, como por exemplo, como começar, como informar e inspirar a equipe, quais funções os assistentes de ensino e intérpretes devem ter e como introduzir o uso da língua de sinais na escola para alunos surdos e ouvintes. Embora as práticas e regulamentações possam diferir entre os países, compartilhar desafios e melhores práticas é informativo e inspirador. Nosso objetivo é contribuir para a discussão em torno da educação inclusiva e como alcançar interações sociais sem barreiras em um ambiente de aprendizado ideal para crianças com SDA. Palavras-chave: Escola bilíngue bimodal (BiBi). Educação regular inclusiva. Comatrícula. Ensino Fundamental. Língua de sinais de Holanda (NGT).
Reading continues to be a challenging task for most deaf children. Bimodal bilingual education cr... more Reading continues to be a challenging task for most deaf children. Bimodal bilingual education creates a supportive environment that stimulates deaf children’s learning through the use of sign language. However, it is still unclear how exposure to sign language might contribute to improving reading ability. Here, we investigate the relative contribution of several cognitive and linguistic variables to the development of word and text reading fluency in deaf children in bimodal bilingual education programmes. The participants of this study were 62 school-aged (8 to 10 years old at the start of the 3-year study) deaf children who took part in bilingual education (using Dutch and Sign Language of The Netherlands) and 40 age-matched hearing children. We assessed vocabulary knowledge in speech and sign, phonological awareness in speech and sign, receptive fingerspelling ability, and short-term memory at time 1 (T1). At times 2 (T2) and 3 (T3), we assessed word and text reading fluency. W...
The present study provides insight into cross-language activation in hearing bimodal bilinguals b... more The present study provides insight into cross-language activation in hearing bimodal bilinguals by (1) examining co-activation of spoken words during processing of signs by hearing bimodal bilingual users of Dutch (their L1) and Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT; late learners) and (2) investigating the contribution of mouthings to bimodal cross-language activation. NGT signs were presented with or without mouthings in two sign-picture verification experiments. In both experiments the phonological relation (unrelated, cohort overlap or final rhyme overlap) between the Dutch translation equivalents of the NGT signs and pictures was manipulated. Across both experiments, the results showed slower responses for sign-picture pairs with final rhyme overlap relative to phonologically unrelated sign-picture pairs, indicating co-activation of the spoken language during sign processing, but no significant effect for sign-picture pairs with cohort overlap in Dutch. In addition, co-activati...
Effects of iconicity on sign language processing – an ERP study
Several studies have found that iconicity does not affect sign processing in deaf proficient sign... more Several studies have found that iconicity does not affect sign processing in deaf proficient signers (e.g., Baus et al., 2013; Bosworth & Emmorey, 2010). In these studies, the effects of iconicity could occur at the level of the whole sign-based on the idea that iconicity may increase semantic processing at the lexical level. In contrast, in several more recent studies that allowed effects to occur at the phonological level, iconicity did appear to facilitate sign processing (e. The role of iconicity in phonological processing was not explicitly addressed in these studies, however. In the present study, we therefore investigated the possible interaction between iconicity and phonological processing in sign recognition. This work is an expansion of a previous ERP study of phonological priming by Guttierez et al. (2012), who found an enhanced N400 for phonologically-related sign pairs in deaf LSE (Spanish Sign Language) signers. However, they did not manipulate iconicity of their sign...
Kinematic Properties of Lexical and Transitional Movements in Sign Language of the Netherlands: A Cyberglove Study
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Abstract. We investigated whether there are quantitative phonetic differences between the kinemat... more Abstract. We investigated whether there are quantitative phonetic differences between the kinematic properties of the lexical sign movements versus those of the transitional movements between signs in signed languages. A Cyberglove and an accessory location ...
The SignSpeak project will be the first step to approach sign language recognition and translatio... more The SignSpeak project will be the first step to approach sign language recognition and translation at a scientific level already reached in similar research fields such as automatic speech recognition or statistical machine translation of spoken languages. Deaf communities revolve around sign languages as they are their natural means of communication. Although deaf, hard of hearing and hearing signers can communicate without problems amongst themselves, there is a serious challenge for the deaf community in trying to integrate into educational, social and work environments. The overall goal of SignSpeak is to develop a new vision-based technology for recognizing and translating continuous sign language to text. New knowledge about the nature of sign language structure from the perspective of machine recognition of continuous sign language will allow a subsequent breakthrough in the development of a new vision-based technology for continuous sign language recognition and translation. Existing and new publicly available corpora will be used to evaluate the research progress throughout the whole project.
This article investigates the articulation of the thumb in flat handshapes (B handshapes) in Sign... more This article investigates the articulation of the thumb in flat handshapes (B handshapes) in Sign Language of the Netherlands. On the basis of phonological models of handshape, the hypothesis was generated that the thumb state is variable and will undergo coarticulatory influences of neighboring signs. This hypothesis was tested by investigating thumb articulation in signs with B handshapes that occur frequently in the Corpus NGT. Manual transcriptions were made of the thumb state in two dimensions and of the spreading of the fingers in a total of 728 tokens of 14 sign types, and likewise for the signs on the left and right of these targets, as produced by 61 signers. Linear mixed-effects regression (LME4) analyses showed a significant prediction of the thumb state in the target sign based on the thumb state in the preceding as well as following neighboring sign. Moreover, the degree of spreading of the other fingers in the target sign also influenced the position of the thumb. We conclude that there is evidence for phonological models of handshapes in sign languages that argue that not all fingers are relevant in all signs. Phonological feature specifications can single out specific fingers as the articulators, leaving other fingers unspecified. We thus argue that the standard term 'handshape' is in fact a misnomer, as it is typically not the shape of the whole hand that is specified in the lexicon.
In an exploratory study of mutual intelligibility between the sign languages of the northern part... more In an exploratory study of mutual intelligibility between the sign languages of the northern part of Belgium (Flemish Sign Language, VGT), the southern part of Belgium (French Belgian Sign Language, LSFB), and the Netherlands (Sign Language of the Netherlands, NGT), we tested the comprehension of VGT by signers of LSFB and NGT. In order to measure the influence of iconic structures (classifier constructions and constructed action) that linguistic analyses have shown to be similar across different sign languages, two genres were compared: narrative and informative signing. To investigate the effect of the overlap between the spoken languages surrounding the Dutch and Flemish Deaf communities, videos were presented in two conditions: first without and subsequently with mouthings. As we hypothesized, both LSFB and NGT signers understood narratives better than informative signing, showing for the first time that iconic structures facilitate comprehension of foreign signing. Furthermore,...
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Papers by Ellen Ormel