Mieke Van Herreweghe

Ghent University | UGhent · Department of Linguistics

Automatic translation from signed to spoken languages is an interdisciplinary research domain on the intersection of computer vision, machine translation (MT), and linguistics. While the domain is growing in terms of popularity—the majority of scientific papers on sign language (SL) translation have been published in the past five years—research in...

Automatic translation from signed to spoken languages is an interdisciplinary research domain, lying on the intersection of computer vision, machine translation and linguistics. Nevertheless, research in this domain is performed mostly by computer scientists in isolation. As the domain is becoming increasingly popular - the majority of scientific p...

In 1990, Vermeerbergen started the first larger-scale corpus study with (semi)spontaneous language data from adult signers on the morpho-syntactic aspects of Flemish Sign Language (VGT). After this, a number of lexicographic projects, including the collection of a 90-h corpus, led to the launch of the first online bilingual Dutch/VGT—VGT/Dutch dict...

Participants data DOI https://doi.org/10.21825/digest.v8i1.15646

The No Child Left Behind Act in the US (2001), the programme “Write it Right” in Australia (1994) and the Council of Europe’s project Languages of Schooling (2006) point towards a growing awareness of unequal access to education. All over the world legislative initiatives have been taken to ensure that all students have access, both in terms of soc...

Constituent order can encode grammatical relations in a language. The visual-spatial modality imbues sign languages with characteristics such as simultaneity or the use of space which raise the question of the appropriate unit of analysis in constituent order studies. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence on the order of core constituents in...

In this paper, we report on data obtained from interviews with 28 deaf signers and three hearing teachers of deaf pupils regarding their experiences with and attitudes towards deaf education and Serbian Sign Language (SZJ). Following transcription of the data, we conducted thematic analyses of the deaf informants’ and teachers’ comments. Data, whic...

The current study will specifically focus on the adaptation and development of the first diagnostic instrument to assess the visual communication and Flemish Sign Language skills in young deaf signing children (≤ 24 months old). This process is based on the adaptation of the ASL-standardized Visual Communication and Sign Language-checklist (Simms e...

This study addresses the topic of visual communication and early sign language acquisition in deaf children with a Flemish Sign Language (Vlaamse Gebarentaal or VGT) input. Results are obtained through a checklist focusing on sign-exposed deaf children's visual communication and early sign language acquisition: the adapted VGT Visual Communication...

One way of increasing caregivers’ language accessibility when interacting with a deaf child is through visual communication strategies. By using both a longitudinal and cross-sectional approach, this study will reveal which strategies deaf and hearing parents prefer and implement in their daily communication with their deaf children. First, the int...

Following Hopper & Traugott (2003 [1993]: 232), grammaticalisation can be defined as “the change whereby lexical items and constructions come in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions and, once grammaticalized, continue to develop new grammatical functions.” Grammaticalisation processes have not been studied very extensively in...

This paper presents an overview of lexicographic projects related to Flemish Sign Language (Vlaamse Gebarentaal or VGT). VGT consists of five regional varieties. There was a time when this lexical variation was considered a disadvantage in deaf education and L2 teaching. That is why in the 1980s and early 1990s the very first lexicographic project...

Recent studies have demonstrated the power of recurrent neural networks for machine translation, image captioning and speech recognition. For the task of capturing temporal structure in video, however, there still remain numerous open research questions. Current research suggests using a simple temporal feature pooling strategy to take into account...

Traditional research examining the communicational choices made by families with deaf children tends to emanate from the premise that families engage with either of the two grand discourses on deafness (i.e., the medical or cultural-linguistic perspective). This study investigated hearing mother's engagement with the educational options for their c...

The current study explores the feasibility of an extensive reading programme in the context of a low-income country (Mozambique), as well as the influence of extensive reading on academic reading. The programme took over 4 months and was conducted among 30 students majoring in Journalism at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique in 2013. The...

This paper focuses on attitudes of Flemish Sign Language (or VGT) signers with respect to Standard(ised) VGT and (varieties of) VGT in the media. Information extracted from interviews with and stimulus fragments shown to ten deaf VGT signers shows that they no longer consider standardization of VGT negatively. However, they do not value standard ve...

Repetition was described in the nineties by a limited number of sign linguists: Vermeerbergen & De Vriendt (1994) looked at a small corpus of VGT data, Fisher & Janis (1990) analysed “verb sandwiches” in ASL and Pinsonneault (1994) “verb echos” in Quebec Sign Language. More recently the same phenomenon has been the focus of research in a growing nu...

This case study provides a first exploratory study on the early Flemish Sign Language acquisition of a deaf infant from the perspective of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Theory. It highlights some remarkable aspects of sign language acquisition with respect to interpersonal interaction between the child and its mother. The free play interactions of...

The central issue tackled by this article revolves around decision-making by public service institutions in respect of the uses and perceived effects of community interpreting and translation in Flanders (Belgium) and/or other resources of language support (such as the use of a lingua franca, soliciting the help of a multilingual co-worker, etc.)....

This study reports on the perception and production of Standard Dutch and Standard British English vowels by speakers of two regional varieties of Belgian Dutch (East Flemish and Brabantine) which differ in their vowel realizations. Twenty-four native speakers of Dutch performed two picture-naming tasks and two vowel categorization tasks, in which...

While the influence of deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) on the comprehension of pragmatic language in Parkinson’s disease (PD) has been the focus of studies, its impact on production, however, has yet to be elucidated. (1) Investigating the inf luence of DBS STN on pragmatic language production in spontaneous speech by...

This chapter deals with linguistic ideologies and deaf people’s attitudes towards Flemish Sign Language (VGT), in the past, in the present, and to some extent also in the future. In its historical evolution, VGT has developed from complete linguistic erasure (Irvine & Gal 2000) to symbolic recognition by mainstream society and legal recognition by...

Rosa versus rossa: The acquisition of Italian geminates by native speakers of Dutch BASTIEN DE CLERCQ, ELLEN SIMON & CLAUDIA CROCCO Focusing on the right cue: Perception of voiceless and voiced stops in English by Brazilian learners UBIRATÃ KICKHÖFEL ALVES & CAMILA SAVICZKI MOTTA On the Edge of Acceptability: Arguments for the Syntactic Dependen...

This study compared the narratives of two hearing mothers with the interactions they created with their deaf infant. Three types of influencing discourses were found: the medical discourse, the cultural linguistic discourse and the spoiled dyad discourse. We showed that both mothers changed their interaction after cochlear implantation to be more m...

e-PDF available at https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/182719 The uses and practices of sign languages are strongly related to scientific research on sign languages and vice versa. Conversely, sign linguistics cannot be separated from Deaf community practices, including practices in education and interpretation. Therefore, the current volume br...

The title of the book, Sign Language Research, Uses And Practices, wants to reflect both the fact that the papers included relate to sign language research on structure, uses and practices, and our belief that sign linguistics cannot be separated from Deaf community practices, including practices in education and interpretation. Furthermore, in our...

The title of the book, Sign Language Research, Uses And Practices, wants to reflect both the fact that the papers included relate to sign language research on structure, uses and practices, and our belief that sign linguistics cannot be separated from Deaf community practices, including practices in education and interpretation. Furthermore, in our...

The first information parents receive after referral through Universal Newborn Hearing Screening (UNHS) has significant consequences for later care-related decisions they take and thus for the future of the child with a hearing loss. In this study, 11 interviews were conducted with a representative sample of Flemish service providers to discover (a...

In 2006 and 2007 a project on differences and similarities between SASL and VGT was set up for which a number of grammatical mechanisms and structures were being compared across the two signed languages, using a corpus consisting of similar VGT and SASL-data of a various nature. The overall goal was to contribute to a further understanding of the d...

This chapter deals with data collection within the field of sign language research and focuses on the collection of sign language data for the purposes of linguistic – mainly grammatical – description. Various data collection techniques using both introspection and different types of elicitation materials are presented and it is shown how the selec...

In this chapter, we will present experiences from a number of (ex-) mainstreamed deaf pupils in order to get an understanding of what effects mainstreaming has on the wellbeing and mental health of deaf students. Following some background information on education of deaf pupils in Flanders (section two) and a discussion of advantages and disadvanta...

Between phonological forms and their orthographic representations a close connection can be established. Previous psycholinguistic research has amply illustrated that word recognition can be influenced by orthography (Perre & Ziegler, 2008; Taft, 2001) and that orthography plays a role in phonemic awareness (Cheung, Chen, Lai, Wong, & Hills, 2001;...

This article reports on a study into communicative practices in educational settings by members of the South African Deaf community. The data contain interviews of miscellaneous South African Deaf people who were interviewed through South African Sign Language (SASL) by Deaf SASL users who received a short training on interview simulation. From the...

This article reports on a study into communicative practices in educational settings by members of the South African Deaf community. The data contain interviews of miscellaneous South African Deaf people who were interviewed through South African Sign Language (SASL) by Deaf SASL users who received a short training on interview simulation. From the...

The purpose of this communication is to report on the occurrence of stutter-like behaviour in Flemish Sign Language users. A questionnaire was sent to 38 Flemish Sign Language interpreters and 28 employees of special needs schools adapted to deaf and partially deaf pupils inquiring whether they had ever observed dysfluencies in the manual communica...

In 1997, the Flemish Deaf community officially rejected standardisation of Flemish Sign Language. It was a bold choice, which at the time was not in line with some of the decisions taken in the neighbouring countries. In this article, we shall discuss the choices the Flemish Deaf community has made in this respect and explore why the Flemish Deaf c...

What is South African Sign Language? What is the South African Deaf Community? These two questions may look simple but answering them is quite complicated. It is a well-known fact that across the world, the majority of deaf children have hearing parents who are not likely to know a sign language. These children start acquiring their sign language o...

This paper reports on a comparison of word order issues, and more specifically on the order of the verb and its arguments, in two unrelated sign languages: South African Sign Language and Flemish Sign Language. The study comprises the first part of a larger project in which a number of grammatical mechanisms and structures are compared across the t...

Volume 10 of the series explores sociolinguistics in various European Deaf communities. Editors Van Herreweghe and Vermeerbergen present a wide array of research inspired by the Sociolinguistics Symposium 14 held at Ghent University, Belgium, in April 2002. Noted contributors from Finland, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Spain a...

Looking back on 25 years of Community Interpreting in the Deaf communi-ty in Flanders at least three issues seem to be noteworthy. Linguistic research into Flemish Sign Language has clearly influenced the sign language interpreter training programmes. When the first programmes were started up in the early 1980s, interpreter students were taught Sig...

Looking back on 25 years of Community Interpreting in the Deaf community in Flanders at least three issues seem to be noteworthy. Linguistic research into Flemish Sign Language has clearly influenced the sign language interpreter training programmes. When the first programmes were started up in the early 1980s, interpreter students were taught Sign...

If Deaf people and nonsigners attend a joint meeting, they need at least one sign language interpreter to accomplish successful communication between them.1 It is generally assumed (especially by "outsiders," i.e., nonsigners who have no experience in communicating with Deaf signers) that in such "mixed" meetings the presence of a sign language int...

Even though communication in a 'deaf' classroom is mostly monolingual (Dutch only), most deaf pupils can be considered bilingual since they use Flemish Sign Language among themselves outside the classroom. Therefore it can be expected that some of the mistakes in the written productions of deaf children can be attributed to interference from Flemis...

. In this paper we have tried to establish which paths the Old English modal *motan followed from Old English central meaning of permission to Modern English central meaning of obligation, by looking at peripheral meanings of *motan. The data presented here were drawn from The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. They tell us that *motan was never used in a...

In this article the authors give an overview of sign language interpretation in Flanders, Belgium. After a short introduction on Flanders and its linguistic situation, the authors spend some time discussing sign language in Flanders from a historical perspective and discussing its current situation and especially outside influences on Flemish-Belgi...