DCAL, Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre

• DCAL briefing document

A limited number of bursaries are available to doctoral students to cover the costs of the TISLR registration fee. Please complete the information form here and email it to <tislr2013@ucl.ac.uk>. Applications must be received by 10 June 2013 to be considered.

• Read Issue 12 of the DCAL Newsletter
  

•  Read the full pdf copy of the DCAL Newsletter 11

DCAL Deputy Director, Professor Gary Morgan, and other colleagues from DCAL and City University London have been working with researchers from the University of Sheffield, University of Trento and University of Gothenburg, on a joint project investigating early interaction involving British and Swedish hearing parents and their deaf and hearing 2-3 year old children. This research is the first to show that conversational input about mental states directed towards very young deaf children differs significantly in those areas of interaction thought to be crucial for Theory of Mind (ToM) development. ToM is the reasoning that enables us to reflect on the mental states of others. Importantly it contributes to sophisticated forms of human interaction and provides a basis for understanding others’ actions and dispositions.

Speechreading is the term used by researchers to refer to lipreading. ‘Speechreading’ is preferred to ‘lipreading’ because lots of information is used from all of the face, not just the lips, when you watch someone speak. For deaf people, this can be their primary route to speech information. Hearing people also make great use of visual speech, although they often don’t realize it. If you think of talking to someone in a noisy bar, a hearing person is much more likely to understand a person if they can be seen. This is where the old joke ‘I can’t hear you without my glasses on’ comes from.

According to new research, acquiring sign language from an early age in addition to spoken or written language has significant benefits for deaf children.

A considerable amount of DCAL’s work focuses on research that is improving outcomes for deaf children. DCAL explores how deaf children acquire and use language, as well as how their brains develop. Using this information DCAL can help the parents of deaf children and people who work with deaf children develop tools and strategies to ensure that the children get the best start in life. On the following pages you can read more about some of DCAL’s current research relating to deaf children and development.

TISLR 11 – the 11th Conference on Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research will take place in London next year. This is the major international conference in the field and it will be hosted by DCAL on 10th -13th July 2013.

DCAL’s Dr. Joanna Atkinson’s research into voice hallucinations in deaf people with psychosis was highlighted in a Lancet editorial published on 12 March 2012. The editorial was a commentary on a wider review by the journal on the mental health of deaf people. For more information on the research go to: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dcal/research/research-projects/schizophrenia

Two DCAL associates, Dr David Vinson (UCL Cognitive Perceptual & Brain Sciences) and Dr Evelyne Mercure (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience) have been awarded Future Leader Fellowships by the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) from a total of 54 awards made nationally. The scheme aims to support early career social scientists by funding research projects, and providing researchers with an opportunity to develop the skills and experience they need to become leaders in their field.

DCAL Director Bencie Woll is amongst 38 new academics elected to Fellowships of the British Academy at their 19 July 2012 Annual General Meeting. The British Academy is the equivalent of the Royal Society, but for research in the humanities and social sciences. Bencie’s election is a significant achievement, being the first researcher in the field of Deaf Studies to receive this honour.

Staff from DCAL have been recognised for their outstanding contribution to deaf communication with a nomination for the 2012 Signature Award for the Organisation of the Year.

• TISLR 11 abstracts
  

Joining Up

DCAL and AoHL publish joint report and call for the National Dementia Strategy for England to be reviewed to ensure that funding is provided to meet the needs of people who are deaf or have hearing loss and also have dementia

Cormier, Schembri, Vinson & Orfanidou (2012) is ranked number 5 in ScienceDirect's list of Top 25 Hottest Articles for the journal Cognition, and number 25 for all Elsevier journals within the Arts and Humanities, based on downloads between October and December 2012.

• Further information about the MSC in Language Sciences

• See Prof. Adam Kendon's team page
  

• DCAL research features in the Journal Nature Communications

• TISLR programme
  

• Kate Rowley and Gary Morgan are involved in the Family Sign Language training courses: NDCS is offering free two-day training courses to organisations and professionals who would like to utilise the NDCS Family Sign Language Toolkit.

• Rachel England, Robin Thompson & Gary Morgan presenting work in the Language and Cognition strand at this conference in Lisbon in March.

•  Further information about the MSC in Language Sciences
  

After months of correspondence between DCAL and editors at The Guardian, the newspaper has finally published a correction about the story from 8 October 2012 about politically correct signs in BSL that was misleading in its implied connections with the BSL Corpus Project.

The Autumn 2012 issue of Society Now, an ERSC publication highlighting Research Making an Impact, features an article by DCAL researcher Dr Joanna Atkinson about voice hallucinations in deaf people, "Voices inside my head".

Date: 14^th November, 2012

The road to language learning is iconic

• New leaflet about research targeted at the older deaf community
  

In June 2012, Harry Knoors (Professor in Deaf Education, Radboud University Nijmegen) blogged about research recently published by DCAL on age of acquisition effects in BSL. The original blog was in Dutch; an English translation is below.

•  Directional Verbs in BSL
  

Watch the item on iplayer:

• See Hear Deaf with Dementia
  

• read the latest DCAL Newsletter
  

Response to the following article published by The Guardian on October 8th 2012:

• Original Guardian article

One-day Halloween Workshop at

Frank Barnes School for Deaf Children

•  See Hear will be featuring item on Deaf with Dementia Project on October 17th

• Deaf Children Development Conference blog (https://blogs.city.ac.uk/deafchildsdevelopment/)

According to new research, acquiring sign language from an early age in addition to spoken or written language has significant benefits for deaf children.

• Download the New DCAL Briefing Sheet on Dementia

• For more information, download the flyer

BSL Teacher Award from BDA

To download the paper, please click on the following link:

• Cormier, K., Schembri, A., Vinson, D., & Orfanidou, E. (in press). First language acquisition differs from second language acquisition in prelingually deaf signers: Evidence from sensitivity to grammaticality judgement in British Sign Language. Cognition. Accepted 13 April 2011.

• Click this link to see the BSL Corpus Project featured on The Hub
  

Dr. Joanna Atkinson’s research into voice hallucinations in deaf people with psychosis was highlighted in an editorial  of the Lancet published on 12 March 2012. The editorial was a commentary on a wider review by the journal on the mental health of deaf people.

The editorial focused on issues relating to the need to provide flexible and responsive services to deaf people. Dr. Joanna Atkinson’s research was used as an example to show how the appropriate diagnosis of schizophrenia amongst deaf sign language users can be improved through clinicians taking account of the latest academic work . The editorial also cited the consequences of often poor communication between deaf patients and health professionals.   

For more information Dr. Joanna Atkinson’s research please visit the following webpage.

DCAL is pleased to announce that Dr Ádám Kósa MEP will be visiting the ESRC funded research centre on 8th March 2012.

Dr Ádám Kósa holds a unique position in the European Parliament, having been elected as its first-ever Deaf Member on 7th June, 2009. Dr Ádám Kósa was born in Budapest of Deaf parents and Magyar Jelnyelv (Hungarian Sign Language) is his first language.He is also fluent in Hungarian and English.

Before entering the European parliament Dr Kósa trained as a lawyer and was president of SINOSZ (the national Hungarian organisation representing Deaf and Hard of Hearing people).

Bencie Woll Director, DCAL Research Centre said:

"We are delighted to welcome Dr Kósa to DCAL. As a MEP he has focused a great deal of attention on the status of sign languages in Europe. In 2010 Dr Kósa hosted a conference at the European Parliament which resulted in the Brussels Declaration on Sign Languages in the European Union. The declaration set out principles through which sign language legislation can be brought forward right across the EU."

Dr Ádám Kósa will use the visit to DCAL to meet with representatives of Deaf organisations. He will also be speaking at 4pm in the DCAL library about his work as a Deaf MEP and the status of sign languages in Europe.   

This will be a RSVP-only event for space and catering purposes. The event is however open to individuals and organizations with an interest in the work of Dr Kósa and the status of sign languages in Europe.

Inspired by DCAL’s work? Would you like to get involved in our research projects into sign linguistics, psychology and neuroscience, and help in a practical way?

In the press, at the podium

DCAL Co-Director Professor Gabriella Vigliocco, who is also Professor of the Psychology of Language in the Department of Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences at University College London, and Director of the Language and Cognition Laboratory at University College London, has been able to take her research work on iconicity and embodiment in language to a wide range of audiences over several months - to international academic audiences at a number of conferences and to the wider community via contributing to a fascinating article in New Scientist magazine published in August 2011 by David Robson, Biology Features Editor. The idea for the article came about after he read the paper by Pamela Perniss, Robin Thompson and Gabriella Vigliocco, published in Frontiers in Psychology (2010) discussing iconicity in signed and spoken languages.

Do you know a Deaf British Sign Language (BSL) user who has developed memory or thinking problems?
Appointments are now being offered for Deaf patients at a top UK neurology hospital.

DCAL and the community

Regular readers of the DCAL newsletter will have read that DCAL was to take a Roadshow to six UK cities during 2011. The Roadshow was a chance for DCAL staff to meet with members of the Deaf Community and discuss DCAL’s research together. Some readers may be amongst the hundreds who attended the events. Now with the last leg of the tour having been Belfast in September 2011, there’s been time for the DCAL team to reflect back on the significance of the tour and how it all went.

Funding for the Roadshow was obtained from the University College London (UCL) Beacons for Public Engagement programme. These awards are given for innovative projects that seek to engage with audiences that the university does not traditionally talk or listen to, or those who are socially excluded.

DCAL postgraduate researcher and member of the Roadshow team, Robert Adam, explains more: “Deaf people do not know as much about their sign language as hearing people know about their spoken language. This is because it is not studied as a language in schools. So Deaf people do not always understand the nature of their language and how being Deaf can influence their experience. Similarly Deaf people do not have equal access to society because not everyone can sign and interpreters are not readily available. This affects peoples’ everyday experience and it also affects access to information that can be really important to them. Critically, in the past, research on Deaf people and sign language has often not been accessible for Deaf people. DCAL believes that it’s an important part of our role to disseminate research findings in BSL to the Deaf Community.”

With the £12,000 funding award DCAL staff were able to travel to Birmingham in March, Glasgow in April, Newcastle and Manchester in May, Bristol in July and finally Belfast.

At each Roadshow, held in Deaf centres, three to four DCAL researchers spoke about their work on different topics. These included language acquisition, the Deaf brain, Deaf interpreters, Deaf people and autism, Deaf people and dementia, the sign segmentation project and the British Sign Language (BSL) Corpus project.

Deaf people who attended the events came via a variety of networks. Other participants included those who work with the Deaf Community such as interpreters and social workers. With a good number of attendees at each event it demonstrated to DCAL that people are really keen to learn about the Centre’s work. Most of the feedback was positive, with Deaf visitors saying they enjoyed the days, that the research projects were interesting and well-explained and how good it was to have access to the research that is being carried out by DCAL at first hand. People also came forward with useful suggestions about future DCAL research.

For further details, visit the DCAL website: www.dcal.ucl.ac.uk. More public engagement pages are being added over time and all the presentations from the DCAL Deaf Open Day and DCAL Roadshows will eventually be available. It is hoped that DCAL’s website will become a really useful resource for Deaf people to continue to learn about, and get involved in, DCAL’s research.

Unique BSL resource becomes available to all online

An important development has been made in a project that will be familiar to many DCAL newsletter readers from updates over the last few years: DCAL is pleased to announce that data from the British Sign Language Corpus Project (BSLCP) can now be accessed by all, having gone live on-line at the end of 2011. 

Across the world most children born today will grow up in bilingual or multi-lingual environments. These children will use two or more languages regularly. One language might be for home, and another for school; or parents might have different linguistic backgrounds. In London and other major cities classrooms are increasingly multilingual. The internet and TV also offer the opportunity for children to learn and absorb new languages. In the past it was thought that early exposure to two languages was confusing for children. But newer research tells us this is not so, and that there are clear cognitive and educational advantages to being bilingual, such as more being able to divide attention between different tasks or understanding the communicative intent of a speaker.

DCAL is an outstanding place for postgraduate studies in deafness, cognition and language. All students are integrated into the DCAL community in a personal and academic capacity, and in a practical capacity.

In addition to supervision from one or more DCAL staff, students benefit from seminars and centre meetings, and have full access to DCAL resources such as the specialist DCAL library, laboratories, studio space and video editing suite.

There is a research student room on the 4th floor in DCAL itself. Some students also have workspace elsewhere in University College London (UCL), depending on where their supervisor is based. But students are also always on the move, attending meetings and training courses, not only within DCAL but also around UCL. They travel regularly outside of London for conferences and meetings, and often travel to collect data for their research projects.

Applications are invited for students wishing to study for an MPhil/PhD degree at DCAL. This includes students who have an undergraduate degree (UK 2:1 or better, or top 40% in the class) and who have research interests that fit in with DCAL staff expertise and interests. Inquiries and applications from deaf students are particularly welcome.

Newsletter Issue 10: Welcome Message

Wishing all readers a good 2012!

Dear friends,
We hope this Winter 2011/New Year 2012 issue of the DCAL newsletter will greet you soon after you return to work from a peaceful Christmas and New Year break.

The newsletter reviews just some of the activities that the DCAL team has been engaged in these last six months since the DCAL summer newsletter. 

All of us here at DCAL can look back on 2011 as a busy and productive time – the first year since the Centre’s work was recognised by receive funding from the Economic and Social Research Fund (ESRC) for a further 5 years’ research and public engagement work. This last year saw us set off on “DCAL II”. We look forward to continuing this journey into 2012, and once more to a year of fruitful and inspiring collaboration with many newsletter readers – academic colleagues, practitioners, press, policy makers and community members.

We hope this issue will make interesting reading for you. If you would like to read about any of the research in more detail please go to DCAL’s website or if you have comments or questions please email us.

With all good wishes for the New Year 2012,

DCAL directors – Professor Bencie Woll, Professor Gabriella Vigliocco, Professor Gary Morgan, Dr Mairead MacSweeney

Building research capacity for the future

The ESRC Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre (DCAL) includes within its mission, and its core values, a commitment to developing expertise in deafness, language and cognition among postgraduate research students. And this commitment is clear from DCAL’s postgraduate research record.

Since its foundation in 2006, DCAL staff have supervised 15 postgraduate students in the area of deafness, cognition and language. As of 2011 six of these have already earned their PhDs and another six currently working towards their doctorate are expecting to complete during 2012. DCAL is very proud of these success stories, and would be glad to welcome more students. It is important to the centre to help build capacity in the widest field of its research remit, and DCAL is especially keen to welcome junior deaf academics who will be key in developing the future research agenda.