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Visual Reception of Sign Language in Young Deaf Children: Is Peripheral Vision Functional for Receiving Linguistic Information? M. Virginia Swisher The amount of information available to a deaf child in a given communication situation is limited in two ways: First, the child has only one primary input channel, vision, to use for gaining both environmental and linguistic information, and second, that channel is directional as opposed to global in reception. The child does not have access to information-whether environmental or linguistic-from behind, and typically, of course, the range of vision is provided by a very small portion of the retina (1 to 2 degrees of arc), constraining us to turn and focus on things if we are to see them clearly. Peripheral vision is generally considered inadequate for detailed form perception, apart from limited identification of letters just beyond the point of fixation in reading. Although peripheral vision is not useful for situations in which high acuity is required, there is reason to ask whether it might be functional for the perception of signs. Signs are comparatively large visual stimuli, and they involve motion, to which peripheral vision is comparatively sensitive. In fact, signs are perceived peripherally under normal circumstances, in the sense that the addressee in a signed conversation focuses on the signer's face rather than the hands (Siple 1978). My sincere thanks to Dr. Helen Craig and the staff and students at the Western Pennsylvania School for the Deaf, without whom this study would not have been possible. My thanks also to Karen Christie and Sandra L. Miller for their assistance in working out the design and carrying out the study. Finally, my thanks to our many kind advisors, in particular Dr. H. N. Reynolds, who provided guidance and expertise from the project's inception, and Carol Baker, who performed the statistical analyses. 170 Visual Reception of Sign Language in Young Deaf Children 171 The question here is whether signs can be identified farther into the periphery, in situations where the addressee is not looking directly at the signer. One reason to think such identification might be possible is that the steepest drop in acuity occurs just outside the fovea, and it could be that the further decrease in acuity between the area where signs are normally perceived and the extreme periphery would not significantly affect perception, particularly not of familiar visual stimuli such as signs. In addition, deaf students have some visual skills that might be useful for the perception of signs in degraded conditions. For example, they tend to do best on visual tests that call for global pattern recognition , such as block design and pattern matching, as well as on tests of visual closure, where they perform better than hearing people (Parasnis 1983; Siple, Hatfield & Caccamise 1978). Visual closure, in particular, might facilitate the recognition of signs in conditions of poor acuity. The question of how far into the periphery the perception of signs is possible (the extent of deaf children's functional visual field) is educationally relevant in three ways. First, for many deaf children, vision is the primary avenue for language acquisition. The overall amount of data reaching the children and the completeness of the data are two factors that are likely to contribute to the success or failure of the children's acquisition of English via signed input, and both depend on what the child sees. If the child does not need to be focusing on the signer in order to take in signed information, then more input would be potentially available (ignoring for the moment more complex issues of how visual and cognitive attention intersect). Second, if deaf children were more sensitive than hearing children to peripheral visual information, and particularly if they could receive linguistic information peripherally, they might be more vulnerable to visual distraction than are hearing students. Third, the extent of deaf children's functional visual field may have implications for the presentation of visual information in the classroom, and for the positioning of educational interpreters, particularly where the teacher is performing a demonstration and talking about it at the same time. SUBJECTS The present study, investigating the abilities of deaf students between 8 and 12 years of age, is the second in a series of studies of deaf students' ability to read signs in peripheral vision. In the first study, reported in Swisher, Christie, and Miller (1989), procedures were developed and students between 15 and 18 years of age were tested. In both studies...

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