Joanna Atkinson

UCL · Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre

Numerous studies suggest an association between language and executive function (EF), but evidence of a developmental relationship remains inconclusive. Data were collected from 75 deaf/hard‐of‐hearing (DHH) children and 82 hearing age‐matched controls. Children were 6–11 years old at first time of testing and completed a battery of nonverbal EF ta...

This study examined facial expressions produced during a British Sign Language (BSL) narrative task (Herman et al., International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders 49(3):343–353, 2014) by typically developing deaf children and deaf children with autism spectrum disorder. The children produced BSL versions of a video story in which two...

Background: Deafness has an adverse impact on children's ability to acquire spoken languages. Signed languages offer a more accessible input for deaf children, but because the vast majority are born to hearing parents who do not sign, their early exposure to sign language is limited. Deaf children as a whole are therefore at high risk of language...

Previous research has highlighted that deaf children acquiring spoken English have difficulties in narrative development relative to their hearing peers both in terms of macro-structure and with micro-structural devices. The majority of previous research focused on narrative tasks designed for hearing children that depend on good receptive language...

Studies have suggested that language and executive function (EF) are strongly associated. Indeed, the two are difficult to separate, and it is particularly difficult to determine whether one skill is more dependent on the other. Deafness provides a unique opportunity to disentangle these skills because in this case, language difficulties have a sen...

Many synesthetes experience colors when viewing letters or digits. We document, for the first time, an analogous phenomenon among users of signed languages who showed color synesthesia for fingerspelled letters and signed numerals. Four synesthetes experienced colors when they viewed manual letters and numerals (in two cases, colors were subjective...

Objective Most existing tests of memory and verbal learning in adults were created for spoken languages, and are unsuitable for assessing deaf people who rely on signed languages. In response to this need for sign language measures, the British Sign Language Verbal Learning and Memory Test (BSL-VLMT) was developed. It follows the format of the Engl...

To provide accurate diagnostic screening of deaf people who use signed communication, cognitive tests must be devised in signed languages with normative deaf samples. This article describes the development of the first screening test for the detection of cognitive impairment and dementia in deaf signers. The British Sign Language Cognitive Screenin...

Recent studies suggest that deaf children perform more poorly on working memory tasks compared to hearing children, but do not say whether this poorer performance arises directly from deafness itself or from deaf children’s reduced language exposure. The issue remains unresolved because findings come from (1) tasks that are verbal as opposed to non...

This chapter highlights that researchers interested in assessments need separate, specifically designed tests of language and cognition for deaf sign language users rather than relying on tests designed for users of spoken languages. Tests that are developed specifically for deaf signers and that produce deaf norms are an invaluable tool in both si...

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) perform poorly on sentence repetition tasks across different spoken languages, but until now, this methodology has not been investigated in children who have SLI in a signed language. Users of a natural sign language encode different sentence meanings through their choice of signs and by altering the...

Facial expressions in sign language carry a variety of communicative features. While emotion can modulate a spoken utterance through changes in intonation, duration and intensity, in sign language specific facial expressions presented concurrently with a manual sign perform this function. When deaf adult signers cannot see facial features, their ab...

We used fluency tasks to investigate lexical organisation in Deaf adults who use British sign language (BSL). The number of responses produced to semantic categories did not differ from reports in spoken languages. However, there was considerable variability in the number of responses across phonological categories, and some signers had difficulty...

This paper presents the first ever group study of specific language impairment (SLI) in users of sign language. A group of 50 children were referred to the study by teachers and speech and language therapists. Individuals who fitted pre-determined criteria for SLI were then systematically assessed. Here, we describe in detail the performance of 13...

Speech and sign production both require precise coordination of multiple articulators. The characteristics of dysarthria following ataxia have been well-documented, but less is known about the consequences of ataxia for sign language, which uses the hands and arms as articulators. This is the first study to examine ataxic dysarthria in a sign langu...

Background: Children with autism tend to look less at others’ faces (Klin, Jones et al., 2002; Dawson et al, 2004, 2005) and show deficits on a range of face processing tasks compared to their peers (Schultz 2005). Such impairments might have specific consequences for deaf children with autism who use sign language, as the face plays an important...

Previous research has not taken account of the possibility that deaf people will show greater heterogeneity in how they experience voice-hallucinations due to individual differences in experience with language and residual hearing. This study aims to explore how deaf participants perceive voice-hallucinations and whether the perceptual characterist...

Traditional conceptualizations of working memory (WM) make a number of well-founded assumptions about cognitive phenomena. Visuospatial and verbal processes are viewed as separable, and a sound-based phonological code is believed to underlie the processing of language. The construct of deafness can be framed in different ways. Both audiological and...

The study of voice-hallucinations in deaf individuals, who exploit the visuomotor rather than auditory modality for communication, provides rare insight into the relationship between sensory experience and how "voices" are perceived. Relatively little is known about the perceptual characteristics of voice-hallucinations in congenitally deaf people...

Traditional conceptualizations of working memory (WM) make a number of well-founded assumptions about cognitive phenomena. Visuo-spatial and verbal processes are viewed as separable, and a sound-based phonological code is believed to underlie the processing of language. For deaf individuals, however, the typical assumptions may not apply. Linguisti...

There has been substantial research interest in recent years in the relationship between the development of language and cognition, especially where dissociations can be seen between them. Williams syndrome, a rare congenital disorder characterized by a fractionation of higher cortical functions, with relatively preserved language but marked diffic...

Phonological theories have to account for the phonology of all languages, whatever their modality. The extent to which modality influences the phonology of signed languages is therefore an important topic, and one which is currently the subject of much debate (Brentari, 2007; Sandler & Lillo-Martin, 2006; inter alia). One of the ways in which modal...