Purpose: This study examined the effects of deafness and sign language use on the distribution of attention across the top and bottom halves of faces.
Methods: In a composite face task, congenitally deaf signers and typically hearing controls made same/different judgments of the top or bottom halves of faces presented with the halves aligned or spatially misaligned, while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded.
Results: Both groups were more accurate when judging misaligned than aligned faces, which indicates holistic face processing. Misalignment affected all ERP components examined, with effects on the N170 resembling those of face inversion. Hearing adults were similarly accurate when judging the top and bottom halves of the faces, but deaf signers were more accurate when attending to the bottom than the top. Attending to the top elicited faster P1 and N170 latencies for both groups; within the deaf group, this effect was greatest for individuals who produced the highest accuracies when attending to the top.
Conclusions: These findings dovetail with previous research by providing behavioral and neural evidence of increased attention to the bottom half of the face in deaf signers, and by documenting that these effects generalize to a speeded task, in the absence of gaze shifts, with neutral facial expressions.
In Colombia, approximately more than 500.000 people have disabling hearing loss, representing around 1% of the population in Colombia, and only 400 professional interpreters of Colombian Sign Language (LSC) are available in the whole country. In this data descriptor, we present a dataset with recordings of Colombian Sign Language (LSC) as an important effort to develop technologies that facilitate social inclusion and equity for the deaf community in Colombia.
In psycholinguistics, studies are conducted to understand language processing mechanisms, whether in comprehension or in production, and independently of the language modality. To do so, researchers need accurate psycholinguistic information about the linguistic material they use. One main obstacle to this process is the lack of information available in sign language.
Little is known about the neural changes that accompany sign language learning by hearing adults. We used ERPs and a word-sign matching task to assess how learning impacted the N400 priming effect (reduced negativity for translations compared to unrelated trials). English monolinguals (N = 32) learned 100 ASL signs - half highly iconic (meaning was guessable), half non-iconic.
Research on the language acquisition of deaf individuals who are exposed to accessible linguistic input at a variety of ages has provided evidence for a sensitive period of first language acquisition. Recent studies have shown that deaf individuals who first learn language after early childhood, late first-language learners (LL1), do not comprehend reversible Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) sentences. The present study analyzed 478 signed productions elicited with pictures depicting simple events with one or two arguments by 28 signers.
Speech impairment hinders effective oral and auditory communication, but a real-time sign language detector can enhance interactions between deaf individuals and the general public.
Developing accurate models for static and dynamic sign language recognition (SLR) poses challenges due to variations in signers’ speeds and durations, prompting the need for advanced methods.
The study introduces the CNNSa-LSTM model, combining CNN, Self-Attention, and LSTM for improved feature extraction and sequential data processing, achieving high accuracy rates (98.7%) and outperforming existing models in SLR tasks.
