Suchergebnisse

The present paper will explore the impacts of the recent pandemic crisis on the Italian Deaf community, as a linguistic minority. Recent research has shown that minorities are suffering much more the effects of the pandemia because their lack of access to services and in a much wider perspective, to education and welfare. We will show that, during the COVID crisis, despite lockdown measures, various actions at the formal political level (from the Italian Deaf Association) and at the informal level (from the members of the community) promoted sign language and the Deaf community within the hearing majority. In particular, we will analyse how social networks were exploited at the grassroot level in order to promote social cohesion and share information about the coronavirus emergency and how the Deaf community shaped the interpreting services on the public media. The role of social networks, however, has gone far beyond the emergency as it has allowed deaf people to create a new virtual space where it was possible to discuss the appropriateness of various linguistic choices related to the COVID lexicon and to argue about the various interpreting services. Furthermore, in such emergency, the interpreting services were shaped following the needs expressed by the Deaf community with the results of an increased visibility of Italian sign language (LIS) and empowerment of the community. Materials spontaneously produced by members of the Deaf Italian community (conferences, debates, fairy tales, and entertainment games) were selected, as well as materials produced by LIS interpreters committed to guaranteeing access to information. By highlighting the strategies that a minority group put in place to deal with the COVID-19 emergency, we can better understand the peculiarities of that community, creating a bridge between worlds that often travel in parallel for respecting the peculiarities of each other (deaf and hearing communities).

Italian deaf children in elementary and middle school have limited competence in written Italian, which is in part caused by difficulties with lexical and morphosyntactic aspects of the Italian language. This study describes a recently developed interactive multimedia application designed to facilitate deaf children's access to new information and reports the results of an initial experiment conducted with deaf elementary and middle school children. Subjects were twelve deaf children with varying backgrounds and linguistic competencies, ranging in age from 6;6 to 16;1 years. Experimentation was structured in three phases. In the initial phase, children explored the computer environment freely, and in the two subsequent phases, children were presented with activities requiring use of the application to obtain information. Results of a final evaluation indicated that all children were able to use and profit from the application. Findings are discussed in terms of bilingual methods of education for deaf children and their implications for increasing deaf children's competence in written language.

"This volume reveals new insights on the faculty of language. By proposing a new approach in the analysis and description of Italian Sign Language (LIS), that can be extended also to other sign languages, this book also enlightens some aspects of spoken languages, which were often overlooked in the past and only recently have been brought to the fore and described. First, the study of face-to-face communication leads to a revision of the traditional dichotomy between linguistic and enacted, to develop a new approach to embodied language (Kendon, 2004). Second, all structures of language take on a sociolinguistic and pragmatic meaning, as proposed by cognitive semantics, which considers it impossible to trace a separation between purely linguistic and extralinguistic knowledge. Finally, if speech from the point of view of its materiality is variable, fragile, and non-segmentable (i.e. not systematically discrete), also signs are not always segmentable into discrete, invariable and meaningless units. This then calls into question some of the properties traditionally associated with human languages in general, notably that of 'duality of patterning'. These are only some of the main issues you will find in this volume that has no parallel both in sign and in spoken languages linguistic research"--

AbstractBy providing evidence that sign language is an autonomous language, research has contributed to various changes both within and beyond the signing communities. The aim of this article is to show an example of how sign language change is driven not only by language internal factors but also by changes in language perception, as well as in the changing groups of users and the contexts of use. Drawing from data collected at a sign language research centre in Italy on Italian Sign Language during a time span of over thirty years, the present study will show how language research was a major impetus for a new linguistic awareness and changes in language attitude has influenced new linguistic practices and has forced Italian signers to think about rules governing the use of their language.