It's the most fun you can have while learning to sign . .

The follow-up to the bestselling "The American Sign Language Puzzle Book," this fun guide from ASL signer Justin Segal gives you tons more of your favorite brainteasers, word searches, scrambles, and crosswords to help you learn the signs with ease.. .

Whether you're a beginning or advanced signer, you'll improve your skills in no time with: . . A fresh variety of puzzles that will broaden your ASL vocabulary . Expressive drawings that show exact hand movements, including placement, direction, and repetition . Puzzles designed to increase your ability to construct phrases . A complete answer key you can use to keep track of your progress .

Open the door to greater communication with your preverbal child through Baby Sign Language. This practical, illustrated guide shows how simple, easy-to-remember gestures can be used by you and your baby or toddler--to convey thoughts, needs, questions, and answers. It's easy, and babies absolutely love it

Baby-signing takes just a few hours to learn, and can be taught to babies as young as six months of age. In this volume, workshop instructor Karyn Warburton presents more than 200 baby-friendly signs covering a wide variety of subjects that little ones will love to learn and use, and will develop their cognitive skills, cut down on communication frustration, and create a stronger bond. This delightful, easy-to-use book features:

- Clear, step-by-step instructions--based on the Baby Talk workshop format
- Photographs and drawings to illustrate each sign
- Baby-centered sign language activities, including songs and storytelling
- Signs graded for difficulty levels
- Tips on how to introduce and reinforce key signs

The study of childhood deafness offers researchers many interesting insights into the role of experience and sensory inputs for the development of language and cognition. This volume provides a state of the art look at these questions and how they are being applied in the areas of clinical and educational settings. It also marks the career and contributions of one of the greatest scholars in the field of deafness: Bencie Woll. As the field of deafness goes through rapid and profound changes, we hope that this volume captures the latest perspectives regarding the impacts of these changes for our understanding of child development. The volume will be of essential interest to language development researchers as well as teachers and clinical researchers.

This volume shows how any two persons may be capable, in half an hour's time, to discourse together by their fingers only, and as well in the dark as the light. The directions herein given are so clear and the method so extensive (yet both superlatively easy) that if six persons are in company (and each of them well versed in the design) yet two of them may discourse together, and the other four wholly ignorant of what they mean. Due to the age and scarcity of the original we reproduced, some pages may be spotty, faded or difficult to read. Written in Old English.

A concise overview of key findings and ideas in sign language phonology and its contributions to related fields, including historical linguistics, morphology, prosody, language acquisition and language creation. Working on sign languages not only provides important new insights on familiar issues, but also poses a whole new set of questions about phonology, because of the use of the visual communication modality. This book lays out the properties needed to recognize a phonological system regardless of its modality. Written by a leading expert in sign language research, the book describes the current state of the field and addresses a range of issues that students and researchers will encounter in their work, as well as highlighting the significant impact that the study of sign languages has had on the field of phonology as a whole. It includes lists of further reading materials, and a full glossary, as well as helpful illustrations that demonstrate the important aspects of sign language structure, even to the most unfamiliar of readers. A text that will be useful to both specialists and general linguists, this book provides the first comprehension overview of the field.

Babies learn fastest when sign language is included in a variety of daily routine and fun activities. Illustrated with clear, brightly coloured photographs, these flash cards are the perfect tool for signing about the fun things that babies get excited about, such as toys, animals and everyday objects. The deck consists mostly of nouns, since these are the concepts conveyed most effectively by a flash card. This refreshed edition of Monta Briant's Baby Sign Language Basics Flash Cards - a perfect companion to her book of the same name, also recently repackaged with new visuals - gives parents and caregivers a fun, easy-to-use tool for making sign language enjoyable and easy to learn.

Linguistic minorities are often severely disadvantaged in legal events, with consequences that could impact one's very liberty. Training for interpreters to provide full access in legal settings is paramount. In this volume, Jeremy L. Brunson has gathered deaf and hearing scholars and practitioners from both signed and spoken language interpreting communities in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Their contributions include research-driven, experience-driven, and theoretical discussions on how to teach and assess legal interpreting. The topics covered include teaming in a courtroom, introducing students to legal interpreting, being an expert witness, discourses used by deaf lawyers, designing assessment tools for legal settings, and working with deaf jurors. In addition, this volume interrogates the various ways power, privilege, and oppression appear in legal interpreting. Each chapter features discussion questions and prompts that interpreter educators can use in the classroom. While intended as a foundational text for use in courses, this body of work also provides insight into the current state of the legal interpreting field and will be a valuable resource for scholars, practitioners, and consumers.

In this follow up to Educational Interpreting: How It Can Succeed, published in 2004, Elizabeth A. Winston and Stephen B. Fitzmaurice present research about the current state of educational interpreting in both K-12 and post-secondary settings. This volume brings together experts in the field, including Deaf and hearing educational interpreters, interpreter researchers, interpreter educators, and Deaf consumers of educational interpreting services. The contributors explore impacts and potential outcomes for students placed in interpreted education settings, and address such topics as interpreter skills, cultural needs, and emergent signers. Winston and Fitzmaurice argue massive systemic paradigm shifts in interpreted educations are as needed now as they were when the first volume was published, and that these changes require the collaborative efforts of everyone on the educational team, including: administrators, general education teachers, teachers of the deaf, interpreters, and counselors. The contributors to this volume address research-based challenges and make recommendations for how interpreting practitioners, and all members of the educational team, can enact meaningful changes in their work towards becoming part of a more comprehensive solution to deaf education.

The Second International Symposium on Signed Language Interpretation and Translation Research was a rare opportunity for hearing and Deaf students, researchers, educators, and practitioners to come together and learn about current research in Interpretation and Translation Studies. These selected papers are comprised of research conducted in places such as Australia, Flanders, France, and Ghana, creating a volume that is international in scope. Editors Danielle I. J. Hunt and Emily Shaw have collected papers that represent the advances in the depth and diversity of knowledge in the field of signed language interpretation and translation research. Chapter topics include the use of haptic signals when interpreting for Deafblind people, the role of French Deaf translators during the 2015 Paris terror attacks, and Deaf employees' perspectives on interpreting in the workplace. Signed chapter summaries will be available on the Gallaudet University Press YouTube channel upon publication.

Experienced ASL instructor Leann Sebrey champions two-way sign communication between parents and their infants who are just months old as a way to bond more closely and reduce frustration, while also maximizing the children's intelligence and emotional quotients.
Sebrey's book "The Parents' Guide to Baby Signs: Early Communication with Your Infant" lays out an easy, step-by-step process that will instill confidence in parents who have never signed before. She begins by explaining why ASL is best for all children, both deaf and hearing. Sebrey also recognizes the different ways young children learn, encouraging parents and caregivers to sign with infants at all times as a natural part of their interaction. She reveals the first indications of when a baby is ready to communicate, and includes a list of signs to provide parents with a good starting point. Sebrey discusses the moments when infants are most receptive to learn signs and outlines numerous practical techniques with plenty of helpful hints to speed the process. She describes the pleasure of seeing a baby's first sign, and tells parents how to interpret baby signs, including what to do when a baby uses the wrong signs. Full of easy-to-grasp illustrations of child and family-oriented signs, "The Parents' Guide to Baby Signs" is the best how-to book for parents, caregivers, and educators to teach early communication to infant.

Raija Nieminen, a deaf woman from Finland, had been leading a very full life as both a librarian and mother of two children. Then her husband Jukka won an exciting new job designing the harbor in the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. Raija suddenly needed to start her life over again in a small, hot, developing country where both the hearing and deaf populations used languages foreign to her. Voyage to the Island recounts the remarkable story of how she adjusted to a strange, exotic island, first by seeking out other deaf persons and learning their sign language. Later, she met Alfonso, a deaf child and an orphan, and realized that he was only one of many deaf children who needed her help. Soon, Raija was teaching at the island's school for the deaf. Her vivid stories of daily frustration mixed with moments of exhilaration at the school make Voyage to the Island an unforgettably moving book. It becomes even more poignant against the backdrop of her own accomplishments as a deaf person advocating complete communication among all people in all communities.

Best known as the Green Books, the American Sign Language books provide teachers and students of American Sign Language (ASL) with the complete means for learning about the culture, community, and the native language of Deaf people. A group of 15 ASL teachers and linguists reviewed all five books to ensure that they were accurate and easy to comprehend. This volume of the American Sign Language series explains in depth the grammar and structure of ASL while also presenting a description of the Deaf community in the United States. Written for teachers with minimal training in linguistics, it includes many illustrations, examples, and dialogues that also focus on specific aspects of the Deaf community.

Best known as the Green Books, the American Sign Language books provide teachers and students of American Sign Language (ASL) with the complete means for learning about the culture, community, and the native language of Deaf people. A group of 15 ASL teachers and linguists reviewed all five books to ensure that they were accurate and easy to comprehend. The three Student Texts are designed to help students acquire conversational ability in ASL and an awareness and appreciation of deaf people. Each text contains nine instructional units that present major grammatical features of ASL through dialogues, introduce students to the intricate features of ASL structure, and discuss individual grammatical features, with sample drills to reinforce mastery of each one.

Human language is not the same as human speech. We use gestures and signs to communicate alongside, or instead of, speaking. Yet gestures and speech are processed in the same areas of the human brain, and the study of how both have evolved is central to research on the origins of human communication. Written by one of the pioneers of the field, this is the first book to explain how speech and gesture evolved together into a system that all humans possess. Nearly all theorizing about the origins of language either ignores gesture, views it as an add-on or supposes that language began in gesture and was later replaced by speech. David McNeill challenges the popular 'gesture-first' theory that language first emerged in a gesture-only form and proposes a groundbreaking theory of the evolution of language which explains how speech and gesture became unified.

"Signed language interpreting is about access," states author Jeremy L. Brunson at the outset of his new book, and no manifestation of access for deaf people can be considered more complex than video relay services (VRS). In "Video Relay Service Interpreters: Intricacies of Sign Language Access," Brunson delineates exactly how complicated the service can be, first by analyzing sign language interpreting as a profession and its relation to both hearing and deaf clients. He describes how sign language interpreters function in Deaf communities and how regulatory processes imposed by VRS providers can constrain communication access based on each individual's needs.

Brunson proceeds by acclimating readers to the environment of VRS and how the layout of the typical physical plant alters the practice of interpreting. The focus then falls upon intended VRS users, providing insights into their expectations. Interpreters shared their experiences with Brunson in 21 formal interviews and discussions. Many remarked on the differences between face-to-face interpreting and VRS training, which often runs counter to the concept of relating informally with deaf clients as a way to expand access. This thoughtful, sociological study outlines texts that originate between users and interpreters and how they can be used to develop VRS access. "Video Relay Service Interpreters" concludes with the implications of VRS interpreting for sign language interpreting in general and suggests where scholarship will lead in the future.

Ethiopian Sign Language (EthSL) emerged relatively recently; its development is closely tied to the establishment of the first school for deaf students in Addis Ababa by American missionaries in 1963. Today, EthSL is used by more than a million members of the Ethiopian Deaf community, but it remains an under-researched language of Ethiopia. In this work, Eyasu Hailu Tamene presents a groundbreaking study of EthSL that touches on multiple aspects of Deaf people's lives in Ethiopia. Tamene collects data from three principal groups of people: deaf participants, teachers of deaf students, and parents of deaf children. He examines EthSL use within families, in formal and informal settings, and in various community spaces. He documents the awareness among different groups of the services available for deaf people, such as sign language interpreters and Deaf associations. He finds that members of the Deaf community show positive attitudes toward the use of EthSL and investigates the factors that impact those attitudes. His work indicates that there are still critical gaps in recognition and support for the use of EthSL, which can pose a threat to the vitality of the language. The Sociolinguistics of Ethiopian Sign Language will help to advance public understanding of EthSL and contribute to improved educational and social outcomes for the Deaf community in Ethiopia.

The field of sign language interpreting is undergoing an exponential increase in the delivery of services through remote and video technologies. The nature of these technologies challenges established notions of interpreting as a situated, communicative event and of the interpreter as a participant. As a result, new perspectives and research are necessary for interpreters to thrive in this environment. This volume fills that gap and features interdisciplinary explorations of remote interpreting from spoken and signed language interpreting scholars who examine various issues from linguistic, sociological, physiological, and environmental perspectives. Here or There presents cutting edge, empirical research that informs the professional practice of remote interpreting, whether it be video relay service, video conference, or video remote interpreting. The research is augmented by the perspectives of stakeholders and deaf consumers on the quality of the interpreted work. Among the topics covered are professional attitudes and motivations, interpreting in specific contexts, and adaptation strategies. The contributors also address potential implications for relying on remote interpreting, discuss remote interpreter education, and offer recommendations for service providers.

This engrossing study investigates the infancy of American Sign Language (ASL). Authors Ted Supalla and Patricia Clark highlight the major events in ASL history, revealing much of what has not been clearly understood until now. According to tradition, ASL evolved from French Sign Language. The authors analyze the metalinguistic assumptions of these early accounts and also examine in depth a key set of films made by the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) between 1910 and 1920.

American Sign Language is a wonderful silent  language of hands, face, and body that is rich with  nuance, emotion, and grace. Bantam is proud to  present the newly revised Signing :  How To Speak With Your Hands, a  comprehensive and easy-to-use guide that has long  been the invaluable and definitive guide for  families, friends, and professionals who need to  communicate effectively with deaf children and adults. Now  this expanded edition, with redesigned interiors  and updated material, includes even more signs;  large, upper-torso illustrations clearly show  formation and movement of the hands, and their relation  to the face and body. All the beautifully  illustrated signs are accompanied by precise,  easy-to-follow instructions on how to form them. This complete  guide includes chapters on common phrases, the  alphabet, foods and eating, health, recreation, and  the newest chapter covering technology, politics.  education, and music.

Better communication is right around the corner with Teach Your Baby to Sign. You may feel like you can't possibly be any closer with your young child, but the truth is, you can--through sign language. The gift of signing helps children communicate well before they have the verbal ability to do so. Whether you have a young child who hasn't started talking yet, or a child with special needs, signing can open the door to better understanding and connection. In this revised and updated edition of the original Teach Your Baby to Sign, you'll find more than 200 easy-to-learn signs--all beautifully illustrated!--that you and your child can use to enhance your communication and understand more fully what your little one wants and needs. Parenting expert Monica Beyer provides you with 30 new pages of content, including new signs, photographs, and illustrations, as well as an improved layout (popular signs and opposites, such as on/off, listed first in each chapter). You'll find it easy to navigate and begin signing right away. On top of that, you'll find tips and activities to keep you and your child motivated, so that sign language becomes a welcome part of your daily life! Better communication is right around the corner with Teach Your Baby to Sign.

Plains Indian Sign Talk (PST), a complex system of hand signs, once served as the lingua franca among many Native American tribes of the Great Plains, who spoke very different languages. Although some researchers thought it had disappeared following the establishment of reservations and the widespread adoption of English, Brenda Farnell discovered that PST is still an integral component of the storytelling tradition in contemporary Assiniboine (Nakota) culture.
Farnell's research challenges the dominant European American view of language as a matter of words only. In Nakota language practices, she asserts, words and gestures are equal partners in the creation of meaning. Drawing on Nakota narratives videotaped during field research at the Fort Belknap reservation in northern Montana, she uses the movement script "Labanotation" to create texts of the movement content of these performances.
The first and only ethnographic study of contemporary uses of PST, "Do You See What I Mean"? draws on important developments in the study of language and culture to provide an action-centered analysis of spoken and gestural discourse. It offers a theoretical approach to language and the body that transcends the current "intellectualist" versus "phenomenological" impasse in social and linguistic theory.

This volume brings together the best research presented at the first International Symposium on Signed Language Interpreting and Translation Research. Editors Brenda Nicodemus and Keith Cagle have gathered an international group of contributors who are recognized leaders in signed language interpreter education and research. The ten papers in Signed Language Interpretation and Translation Research cover a range of topics, including the need for Deaf perspectives in interpretation research, discourse strategies and techniques that are unique to video relay call settings, the benefits of using sociology as a lens for examining sign language interpreting work, translating university entrance exams from written Portuguese into Libras (Brazilian Sign Language), the linguistic choices interpreters make when interpreting ASL figurative language into English, the nature of designated interpreting, and grammatical ambiguity in trilingual VRS interpreting. The research findings and insights contained here will be invaluable to scholars, students, and practitioners.

In the growing body of research on sign language linguistics, one area of inquiry considers an important component of all sign languages -- handshapes -- and whether the use of specific kinds increase in direct relation to the ease of their formation. Author Jean Ann provides significant clarification in her book "Frequency of Occurrence and Ease of Articulation of Sign Language Handshapes: The Taiwanese Example."
Ann employs a straightforward methodology in her examination of the use of Taiwan Sign Language (TSL) handshapes in five succinct chapters. In the first chapter, she discusses the two approaches linguists have taken toward understanding languages, and how these theories have influenced sign language researchers' consideration of the ease of articulation and frequency of handshapes. In her second chapter, Ann delineates the physiology of hands and explains why certain digits move with greater dexterity than others.
Ann applies this physiological information in the third chapter to construct a model for determining the ease of articulation of any logically possible handshape. She divides the handshapes into three categories, ranging from impossible to easy. In the fourth chapter, she applies her model to examine the patterns of TSL, first by describing the 56 handshapes identified in TSL, then determining how often each is used. She then compares the usage data to the handshapes' ease of formation. The final chapter summarizes her findings and suggests implications of this work that are bound to generate further speculation and study on sign language handshapes in the future.