NEW STUDIES

Developing a theoretical framework for sign language assessment tests
Raylene Paludneviciene, Psychology; Paul Dudis, Linguistics; Peter Hauser, RIT

Language assessment is a necessary component of any program concerned with language development and proficiency. Assessment tools are used in these programs for a variety of purposes—including evaluation for language class placement—and are part of linguistic diagnostics packages as well. Unfortunately, resources for the assessment of ASL proficiency are relatively scarce, putting ASL programs for deaf children at a disadvantage. Currently the field of language testing does not have a clear understanding of how ASL-based tests might be similar to and/or different from English-based tests. Our main goal is thus to consider and develop a theoretical framework with which to produce ASL proficiency tests. The studies that comprise our project would make significant contributions towards establishing working guidelines for test developers aiming to measure ASL skills in different populations.

Exploring Blended Instructional Pedagogy to Enhance Student Learning and Scientific Reasoning Skills in Biology
Qi Wang, Business; Caroline Solomon, Biology;

Instruction of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) content has always been challenging for Gallaudet University's (GU) undergraduate programs which serve deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students who primarily depend upon visual sensory inputs to process information. Several major factors related to STEM subject matters and the university's unique instructional environment have adversely affected student learning delivered through traditional one-pace-fits-all classroom lectures. These factors include DHH students' general lack of prior scientific content knowledge, practice-based skill acquisition in STEM fields that requires learning labs to replicate real-world environment, lack of a universal signing standard, extensive use of fingerspelling in signed lectures, and learners with significantly diverged capability due to GU's liberal undergraduate admission policy. This three-semester multiple case study, proposed to address GU's Research Priority 4—Teaching, Learning and the Communication Environment, is to explore an e-Learning and classroom instruction blended learning pedagogy with DHH biology majors and to examine its associated factors that may influence student comprehension and scientific reasoning skills in Biology, one of the most popular STEM disciplines on campus. The investigation will replicate and expand the instructional design and research framework derived from a multiple-case study which explored blended learning design and individualized instructional delivery with students in Computer Information Systems classes (Wang, 2006). The preliminary findings of the limited experiment (in length and scope) were positive. However, additional studies with a more systematic approach and different target learners in other STEM disciplines are called for to gain further insights on the technology-supported blended learning phenomenon, to test the premise that this alternative learning paradigm can improve DHH student learning of STEM subjects, and to accumulate instructional design and delivery experiences that can be applied to other STEM disciplines.

Adapting the use of the World Health Organization's cross-cultural instruments to identify the mental health needs of deaf and hard of hearing adults in Nepal
Teresa Mason, Social Work

Purpose: The immediate goal of the study is to collect data that will describe the need for mental health services by deaf and hard of hearing (HOH) people in Nepal. As a result of this effort, a baseline that can be used to monitor changes in levels of service will be established. More far reaching, the data can be used to develop proposals to conduct studies for other underserved deaf and HOH communities in other locations.

Methods: The first year of this project focuses on conducting a needs assessment of the mental health needs of the Nepali deaf and HOH communities, as well as assessing the existing infrastructure to provide services. In order to accomplish these goals, the researcher will use instruments developed by the World Health Organization for cross-cultural research (AIMS for investigating the national system for mental health services, SRQ-20 for identifying the presence of mental health issues, and RAMH to assess culturally-relevant factors that may impact mental health). As an additional benefit, the researcher will pilot these instruments in Nepal to assess their validity for use in cross-cultural research with deaf and HOH people.

Rationale/Feasibility: This study was solicited by the director of a mental health agency in Nepal because of the dire need by a severely underserved population. Mental health services in general are lacking in Nepal, and in particular, nearly absent for people who are deaf or HOH. Gallaudet University sits in a unique position because of its concern for the welfare and well-being of the global deaf community. The combination of cross-cultural protocols developed by WHO and the expertise of the researcher in mental health services for deaf people supports the project's feasibility. The results of this project can have a far-reaching impact in several areas, such as improving cross-cultural research methods with deaf individuals, adapting instruments to work with underserved populations, and striving for empowerment and social justice of deaf communities that are largely ignored.

CONTINUED GRANTS

Effects of Bilingualism on Word Order and Information packaging in ASL
Deborah Chen-Pichler, Linguistics

This project aims to study the development of information packaging by ASL monolingual and ASL/English bilingual children. Information packaging refers to the ways in which speakers organize old and new information during discourse with an interlocutor. Recent reports in the acquisition literature have demonstrated that Deaf children as young as 1;6-2;0 appear to make use of topic and focus structures. However, the extent to which these structures adhere to target-like discourse/pragmatic requirements is not clear. It is also not clear from these reports whether children accurately produce the nonmanual (prosodic) features or noncanonical word order that accompany such information structures in adult ASL. This study will collect both longitudinal and experimental data with the goal of uncovering the developmental patterns for topic and focus constructions, as well as their effects on word order and nonmanual prosody. In addition, inclusion of both mono- and bilingual signers will allow investigation of possible cross-modality transfer effects between English and ASL. Bilingualism across two modalities presents opportunities for a wider variety of potential transfer effects than traditional monomodal bilingualism on which current models of transfer are based, and can thus serve as a crucial test case for refining this aspect of linguistic theory.

Perception of Phonological Structure in ASL
Gaurav Mathur, Linguistics

The study investigates how language experience and parameters of phonological structure like handshape, location, and movement affect perception in American Sign Language (ASL). To examine perception, the study uses two experimental techniques in psycholinguistics: primed lexical decision and primed phonological matching. In the first technique, participants judge whether the second sign of a pair is real or nonce. The question is whether the first sign facilitates performance if the two signs share a parameter in common. In the second, novel technique, participants judge whether two signs produced by different signers are the same. The question here is whether participants can detect when the two signs differ slightly in one of the parameters. To evaluate the effects of language experience, performance on these tasks are compared across both Deaf and hearing individuals in three groups: those exposed to ASL from birth; those exposed to ASL after five years of age; and those with no prior

ASL exposure. The significance of the study lies in addressing several priority areas: it identifies aspects of linguistic structure prominent in perception (Priority 8) and determines the degrees of signed language fluency with respect to perception, which can be applied toward language assessment

Parsing sentences in two languages
Pilar Piñar, Linguistics

The main goal of this study is to examine what kind of information, syntactic and semantic, second language learners utilize when they read in their second language. Specifically, we will examine the processing of English relative clauses among different groups of second language learners of English, namely, deaf ASL-English bilinguals, Russian-English bilinguals, and Spanish-English bilinguals. We will also investigate how the participants' English proficiency levels as well as their individual cognitive resources may play a role in how closely second language sentence processing might approximate sentence processing in the L1.