The Gazes of Novice & Native Signers are Different

If it seems like a beginner and fluent signers are looking in different places when they watch someone use ASL—you are right. Eye movement indicates how well a person can understand sign language, according to a new study. The study comes out of the Center for Sensory, Perceptual, and Cognitive Ecology (SPaCE Center) at the NTID (National Technical Institute for the Deaf) in Rochester. Rain Bosworth, an assistant professor, and researcher found that the gaze is greatly affected by a user's language expertise. Fluent signers watch a person's face while novices focus on the hands. Bosworth said:

This fits with what we know about research that shows that signers have very good peripheral vision, especially from the lower visual field. Expert signers look at the face and utilize their peripheral vision for catching the fine details of moving handshapes.

Details of the study are published in the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education. or read more about the study in Science Daily. Below is a video illustration of the results:

Website accessibility study

Many websites are not accessible, according to a company called accessiBe. They tested 10,000,000 websites for accessibility compliance and found:

98% of menus failed
83% of buttons
71% of forms
52% of images
89% of pop-ups.

Read more here.

The Hearing Journal

The June issue of The Hearing Journal is out. It's a well-respected academic journal and the articles are free. Read here articles that include "tips to make videoconferences more hearing-friendly and improve the experience for everyone, not just for the person with hearing loss." There's also information on fluctuating hearing loss, the "Expanding Insurance Coverage of Teleaudiology" and making audiology work during COVID-19 and beyond."

Study: Older Adults Show Poor brain function with Implants

A study out of Antwerp University in Belgium finds cochlear implant recipients over the age of 55 have "significantly poorer cognitive function than their normal-hearing counterparts." Researchers say this finding shows "cochlear implants cannot fully compensate for this deterioration in brain function" due to dementia or natural cognitive decline. Details of the study are in Publishing in Frontiers in Neuroscience. Read more in Science Daily here.

Study: Smoking exposure increases risk of deafness twofold

A Japanese study finds children are more than twice as likely to be born deaf if their mother smoked Even exposure to second-hand smoke increased the likelihood of hearing issues. Read more details in the Daily Mail here.

Not on the Radar: Sexual Assault of College Students With Disabilities

Sexual assault policies at colleges typically don't address the needs of deaf students, among other groups. That's according to a new federal study from the National Council on Disability. Wendy Harbour, the director of the National Center for College Students With Disabilities, who was part of putting together the report, said:

Sexual assault has become a topic of concern on campuses and with the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, but seldom has the conversation included consideration of the needs of college students with disabilities.

The report finds undergraduates with a disability are more likely to be sexually assaulted than their counterparts. The report titled “Not on the Radar: Sexual Assault of College Students With Disabilities” is the very first federally-funded on the subject. It concludes that many school are not in compliance with ADA law, ignoring the needs of deaf and hard of hearing students. For instance, many colleges lack procedures for communicating with assault victims who are deaf or hard of hearing. You'll find the full report on the National Council on Disability website here.

Misleading PR on Implant Surgery

A recent news release about a study on cochlear implant surgical techniques called it a "breakthrough." HealthNewsReview says it wasn't a breakthrough at all. Not only that, there are conflict of interests with device manufacturers. Read more in the respected health news site HealthNewsReview here.

Auditory hallucinations

“For a long time it was assumed that sound simply enters the ear and goes up to the brain,” says Trevor Cox, a professor of Acoustic Engineering at the University of Salford. “Well, there’s actually more connections coming down from the brain to the ear than there are going back up it.” Read the full story about why silence "can make you hear things that aren’t there" in Wired.

Autistic kids and Pronouns

Autistic Deaf children avoid using pronouns, just like their hearing counterparts. A news study out of the University of Texas found deaf children with autism tended to refer to themselves with a name sign rather than a sign pronoun. The two linguistics professors who ran the study speculate that it says something about the way people with autism experience the self, rathe than the result of the arbitrary nature of English pronouns as was thought when studying only hearing autistic children. Read details of the study here.

Study on Implants and Age

If something goes wrong with a cochlear implant and doctors have to perform surgery again, advanced age shouldn't be a consideration as to whether to do the revision. That's the finding of researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You'll find the study in the Journal of the American Medical Association here.

Hearing Moms speak differently when one child is deaf

If a family has twins where one child is deaf and the other is hearing, the mother will speak differently to both of them. That's the finding of a new study out of Indiana University's School of Medicine. Researchers say the mother will speak slower, use fewer syllables and use shorter sentences. Details of the study are in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America here.

Implants and Developmental Delays

Children with cochlear implants are more likely than hearing children to have developmental delays--as much as five times more likely. That's according to a study by Indiana University researchers. they say the difficulties include memory, planning and conceptual learning. Study coauthor William G. Kronenberger said:

William G. Kronenberger

"Cochlear implants produce remarkable gains in spoken language and other neurocognitive skills, but there is a certain amount of learning and catch-up that needs to take place with children who have experienced a hearing loss prior to cochlear implantation. So far, most of the interventions to help with this learning have focused on speech and language. Our findings show a need to identify and help some children in certain domains of executive functioning as well.We are now looking for early markers in children who are at risk before they get implants." 

Details are in the Journal of the American Medical Association Otolaryngology--Head and Neck Surgery. Read more about the study here.

Musicians 4 times more likely to become Deaf

You are four times more likely to become deaf if you are a professional musician than the average person. And it doesn't matter whether the musician is playing in a rock band or a classical music orchestra. That's the finding of a study out of Germany by researchers at Bremen and Oldenburg Universities along with the Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology. Their recommendation? Musicians should wear protective in-ear devices and in stall sound shields between different sections of an orchestra. Details are in the journal Occupational Health and Environmental Medicine. You can read more here.

The Secret is in the hands

To best understand someone, don't look at their face, look at their hands. That's the finding of Stanford University researchers. Here's why: Michael Slepian and his team showed videos to volunteers from the World Series of Poker. Some videos showed player's faces, other clips showed their hands. Some clips showed chest, arms and head. The volunteers weren't very good at figuring out the quality of the player's hands when watching just the player's face. Their guesses improved when the player's could be seen from the waist up. But the best guesses came when the volunteers could see only the person's hands. Slepian speculates that people break their rhythm in body movements when anxious. While the researchers didn't look into how this might play out with sign language, their findings may suggest that signers could be more likely to spot anxiety and thus deception on the part of other people because of the awareness sign language users have of a speaker's hands and arms. Details of the Stanford study are in the journal Psychological Science.

A recipe for Medical Mistakes

Members of the Deaf community often get misdiagnosed and inappropriate treatment is given when they are suffering from mental health issues. That's the finding of a new study out of the Indiana University School of Medicine. Researchers found there are few health providers who are suited to work with the Deaf population--that is, health professionals who know ASL, have been exposure to the Deaf community, and understanding Deaf cultural values. The situation is especially difficult, the researchers say, when it comes to diagnosing serious problems, such as schizophrenia. For instance, explaining the concept of "hearing voices" or "talk therapy" to someone who has been deaf from birth. They call for specialized mental health training for ASL interpreters who work in psychiatric settings. Details of the study are in Journal of Psychiatric Practice.

Personal Time on Medical Tools

It takes a lot of time for physicians who are deaf to set up the tools they need to do their jobs. Tools like electronic stethoscopes and closed-captioning technologies and submitting requests or coordinating with interpreters. While these items help the users, they can take as much as ten hours a week, according to a new study. Researchers asked questions of more than 50 medical students, residents and practicing physicians. Here's what the study found they used the most.

• Amplified stethoscopes (89%)
• Auditory equipment (32%)
• Computer-assisted real-time captioning (21%)
• Signed interpretation (21%)
• Oral interpretation — (14%)

The researchers come from the University of California at Davis, the University of Texas Health Science Center, and University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. You can read details are in the latest issue of the journal Academic Medicine. .

Hearing Loss affects Memory, Thinking

If you are losing your hearing as you grow older, you might also lose your ability to remember and your mental sharpness. That's the finding of a new study. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University say those with hearing loss lose as much as 40 percent on their thinking abilities over time, compared to their counterparts with no hearing loss. Lead author of the study, Dr. Frank R. Lin, published findings a couple of years ago linking hearing loss with dementia. Details are published in JAMA Archives of Internal Medicine.

Implants and ASL study

The first study looking at how ASL helps cochlear implants recipients gets underway in December at RIT’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf. Funded by more than $2 million grant of federal money, researchers will take four years to test students who have implants and those who don't regarding how they perform in class, the quality of relationships, and their ability to problem solve. The main focus is how well the students who have implants and use ASL are doing compared to those without implants and students who are hearing.

Vocabulary Study

Limited vocabulary is the greatest cause of reading problems among deaf children, according to researchers in the Netherlands. Karien Coppens of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research has developed a vocabulary test to be given to elementary school students based on the results of her study. She found weakness in the vocabulary of deaf Dutch children is greatest when confronted by complex words that are long and abstract. Read more about the study here.

More on Rochester Study

We told you this week about a study looking at Rochester's Deaf Community. WHAM-TV offers more detail in the video posted below on DeafNewsToday.com. Or you can read the story here.