Browsing by Subject "Deafness"

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The signing of deaf children with autism : lexical phonology and perspective-taking in the visual-spatial modality
(2010-05) Shield, Aaron Michael; Meier, Richard P.; Cohen, Leslie B.; Beaver, David; Neal-Beevers, A. Rebecca; Quinto-Pozos, David
This dissertation represents the first systematic study of the sign language of deaf children with autism. The signing of such children is of particular interest because of the unique ways that some of the known impairments of autism are likely to interact with sign language. In particular, the visual-spatial modality of sign requires signers to understand the visual perspectives of others, a skill which may require theory of mind, which is thought to be delayed in autism (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985). It is hypothesized that an impairment in visual perspective-taking could lead to phonological errors in American Sign Language (ASL), specifically in the parameters of palm orientation, movement, and location. Twenty-five deaf children and adolescents with autism (10 deaf-of-deaf and 15 deaf-of-hearing) between the ages of 4;7 and 20;3 as well as a control group of 13 typically-developing deaf-of-deaf children between the ages of 2;7 and 6;9 were observed in a series of studies, including naturalistic observation, lexical elicitation, fingerspelling, imitation of nonsense gestures, two visual perspective-taking tasks, and a novel sign learning task. The imitation task was also performed on a control group of 24 hearing, non-signing college students. Finally, four deaf mothers of deaf autistic children were interviewed about their children’s signing. Results showed that young deaf-of-deaf autistic children under the age of 10 are prone to making phonological errors involving the palm orientation parameter, substituting an inward palm for an outward palm and vice versa. There is very little evidence that such errors occur in the typical acquisition of ASL or any other sign language. These results indicate that deaf children with autism are impaired from an early age in a cognitive mechanism involved in the acquisition of sign language phonology, though it remains unclear which mechanism(s) might be responsible. This research demonstrates the importance of sign language research for a more complete understanding of autism, as well as the need for research into atypical populations for a better understanding of sign language linguistics.
“The romance of the telephone” : women, disability, and technology in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature
(2020-08-18) Picherit, Elizabeth Caroline; Murphy, Gretchen, 1971-; Minich, Julie Avril, 1977-; Barrish, Phillip; Wetlauffer, Alex; MacDuffie, Allan; Kafer, Alison
This project traces the literary and cultural history of the telephone and takes into account its complex origin points in sonic theory, oralism, and the intersection of deafness and femininity. The telephone’s origin story, summarized as what I term the “Romance of the Telephone,” situates it as a direct descendent of hearing assistive technologies designed for deaf people, in particular deaf women. As such, I examine how the telephone, as technological object and a cultural symbol, emerged out of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary and sociocultural narratives focused on disability and gender. Prior to the manifestation of the telephone in 1876, emergent sonic theories fueled the literary experiments of nineteenth and early twentieth-century women authors, particularly in terms of their representation of women’s sonic mediation. From deafness to super-hearing, the spectrum of women’s aurality became a literary testing ground in which authors could explore the possibilities and limitations of sound and sonic perception. By examining novels by Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, the oralist and eugenic writing of Alexander Graham Bell, and recovered texts by Florence McLandburgh and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, my dissertation tracks the literary and cultural evolution of women’s aurality in relation to 19th century communication technology, specifically the telephone. My first chapter reads Jane Eyre (1848) and The Mill on the Floss (1860) collectively as speculative fiction, arguing that both Brontë and Eliot used the figure of the female sonic mediator in order to develop and anticipate technological and ideological breakthroughs in sonic theory. My second chapter focuses on the narratives of invention that surround Alexander Graham Bell’s development of the Bell Telephone System, using the concept of crip temporality to reveal the presence of the telephone’s deaf ancestry. My third and final chapter reads two recovered short stories, McLandburgh’s “The Automaton Ear” (1873) and Phelps’s “The Chief Operator” (1909) in order to argue that the interconnected figures of the deaf woman and the telephone operator persist as representational embodiments of this technology’s functionality and accessibility.