This project grant from the National Science Foundation's Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, under the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences program (CFDA 47.075), provides $149,999 to Gallaudet University to study American Sign Language usage. The university will collaborate with deaf researchers to analyze instances of "what" signs in a large sample of American Sign Language videos posted online. Through this analysis, the project aims to contribute to understanding...
This $150,000 National Science Foundation project grant supports research on American Sign Language usage and grammar through analysis of online video data. Funded under the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences program (CFDA 47.075), the collaborative project between The University of New Mexico and deaf researchers aims to 1) contribute to understanding ASL grammar patterns, 2) establish best practices for analyzing internet video data, and 3) increase deaf participation in linguistic...
This National Science Foundation project grant of $149,999 supports research on American Sign Language grammar through 2026. Funded under the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences program (CFDA 47.075), the collaborative project will analyze usage of specific ASL signs in online videos to contribute to understanding ASL structure. It will establish best practices for accessible research using internet data and increase participation of deaf linguists. Specifically, researchers will collect...
This National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, awarded under the STEM Education (CFDA 47.076) program, will support research investigating the neurocognitive basis of arithmetic processing in deaf ASL signers compared to hearing non-signers. The project, totaling $930,271 over 3 years, will examine the impact of language modality and age of language acquisition on the cognitive and neural foundations of arithmetic reasoning. The research will compare early and late deaf ASL signers to hearing...
This National Science Foundation (NSF) Project Grant award under the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CFDA 47.070) program provides $174,999 to Gallaudet University to develop principled methods for studying and designing American Sign Language (ASL)-based intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) that enable deaf ASL users to interact with computers. The project aims to conduct experiments with deaf users to understand how well ASL-based IPA interfaces that recognize limited...
The University of Washington received a $513,750 project grant award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under the Trans-NIH Research Support program (CFDA 93.310) to examine visual mismatch responses to American Sign Language (ASL) signs by deaf and hearing signers. The 3-year project aims to 1) establish a visual mismatch response paradigm in ASL using magnetoencephalography (MEG), and 2) investigate the effect of early language experience on pre-attentive perceptual processing for...
This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) under the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (CFDA 47.075) program provides $160,551 to Gallaudet University to strengthen the pipeline for deaf scientists in signed language research. The project aims to increase the participation of deaf and hard-of-hearing students in the field of signed language research through a mentorship and access model. Key activities include: Providing a cohort of deaf college and university...
The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), under the Research Related to Deafness and Communication Disorders program (CFDA 93.173), awarded a $955,590 Project Grant to McMaster University in Canada. The purpose of this grant is to use cutting-edge neuroimaging techniques to examine predictive speech processing and compensatory mechanisms in younger and older adults, in order to better understand the cognitive strategies underlying successful speech...
This federal Project Grant award of $477,660 from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (CFDA 93.173 - Research Related to Deafness and Communication Disorders) supports research to investigate age-related brain differences that affect speech recognition in older adults. The primary objectives are to characterize how quickly older adults accumulate sensory evidence and how much evidence they require to make speech recognition decisions, and to link these perceptual...
The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), awarded a $415,717 Project Grant under the Research Related to Deafness and Communication Disorders program (CFDA 93.173) to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The objective of this 2-year award, effective June 3, 2025, is to develop and test eye-gaze paradigms to more accurately assess receptive language and learning abilities in children with cerebral palsy and...
This Project Grant award, in the amount of $145,642, was provided by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) under the Research Related to Deafness and Communication Disorders program (CFDA 93.173). The award supports a research study at Gallaudet University to examine the relationship between American Sign Language (ASL) proficiency and spatial cognition skills.
The key products and services to be delivered under this grant include:
Employing electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate how signers process spatial and motor information during ASL communication and how this relates to skills like navigation and perspective-taking.
Assessing the link between ASL proficiency and performance on non-linguistic spatial tasks, testing the hypothesis that fluent ASL users will demonstrate superior accuracy and efficiency in perspective-taking, navigation, and orientation tasks.
Exploring the neural mechanisms underlying spatial cognition in ASL users versus non-ASL users, with the hypothesis that ASL proficiency will be associated with distinct neural patterns, particularly reduced sensorimotor cortex activity during spatial tasks.
The research project will run from September 30, 2024 to August 31, 2026, with the aim of uncovering insights into the cognitive benefits of ASL use and its implications for promoting better health, well-being, and healthy aging in deaf individuals.