FY 2008 Annual Report of Achievements - Gallaudet University

investigating issues that affect the lives of deaf Argentineans, Costa Ricans, and Mexicans, and what
is being done and could be done to address those issues according to deaf people themselves.
Participants were recruited with assistance from their local deaf associations. Data was collected
through 60 signed interviews, written stories, and surveys by a team of qualified deaf Americans, in
collaboration with local deaf language consultants. Due to lack of funding the project is on hold, as the
investigators continue to seek funding to finish transcribing and captioning the interviews.
Language and Gesture in Cross-Linguistic Perspective
See Psychology.
Parsing Sentences in Two Languages II (Eye-Tracking Study)
Status: Ongoing Begin date: July 2007 End date: No set date
Principal Investigator(s):
Dussias, Paola – The Pennsylvania State University
Piñar, Pilar – Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Description:
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. Using eye-tracking technology,
the investigators 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. They also investigate how the participants’ English proficiency levels and
their individual cognitive resources may play a role in how closely second language sentence processing
might approximate sentence processing in the first language.
A Psycholinguistic Investigation of Deaf Readersʼ Activation of Orthography-
Phonology Correspondences in Two Languages
Status: Ongoing Begin date: May 2006 End date: No set date
Principal Investigator(s):
Piñar, Pilar – Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Kroll, Judith – The Pennsylvania State University
Gerfen, Chip – The Pennsylvania State University
Description:
Current bilingual research (e.g., Jared and Kroll, 2001) has shown that hearing bilinguals
reading in one language simultaneously activate phonology-orthography correspondences that exist
in the other language. By testing deaf university students with advanced and intermediate proficiency
levels of written Spanish, this study examines whether a similar cross-linguistic activation pattern of
orthography/phonology correspondences can be observed in lexical decision tasks involving the
subjects’ stronger and weaker written languages. This research, thus, fits within and expands on
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