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The present paper will explore the impacts of the recent pandemic crisis on the Italian Deaf community, as a linguistic minority. Recent research has shown that minorities are suffering much more the effects of the pandemia because their lack of access to services and in a much wider perspective, to education and welfare. We will show that, during the COVID crisis, despite lockdown measures, various actions at the formal political level (from the Italian Deaf Association) and at the informal level (from the members of the community) promoted sign language and the Deaf community within the hearing majority. In particular, we will analyse how social networks were exploited at the grassroot level in order to promote social cohesion and share information about the coronavirus emergency and how the Deaf community shaped the interpreting services on the public media. The role of social networks, however, has gone far beyond the emergency as it has allowed deaf people to create a new virtual space where it was possible to discuss the appropriateness of various linguistic choices related to the COVID lexicon and to argue about the various interpreting services. Furthermore, in such emergency, the interpreting services were shaped following the needs expressed by the Deaf community with the results of an increased visibility of Italian sign language (LIS) and empowerment of the community. Materials spontaneously produced by members of the Deaf Italian community (conferences, debates, fairy tales, and entertainment games) were selected, as well as materials produced by LIS interpreters committed to guaranteeing access to information. By highlighting the strategies that a minority group put in place to deal with the COVID-19 emergency, we can better understand the peculiarities of that community, creating a bridge between worlds that often travel in parallel for respecting the peculiarities of each other (deaf and hearing communities).

The present study examined whether full access to sign language as a medium for instruction could influence performance in Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks. Three groups of Italian participants (age range: 6-14 years) participated in the study: Two groups of deaf signing children and one group of hearing-speaking children. The two groups of deaf children differed only in their school environment: One group attended a school with a teaching assistant (TA; Sign Language is offered only by the TA to a single deaf child), and the other group attended a bilingual program (Italian Sign Language and Italian). Linguistic abilities and understanding of false belief were assessed using similar materials and procedures in spoken Italian with hearing children and in Italian Sign Language with deaf children. Deaf children attending the bilingual school performed significantly better than deaf children attending school with the TA in tasks assessing lexical comprehension and ToM, whereas the performance of hearing children was in between that of the two deaf groups. As for lexical production, deaf children attending the bilingual school performed significantly better than the two other groups. No significant differences were found between early and late signers or between children with deaf and hearing parents.

A picture naming task, the Boston Naming Test, originally developed for spoken language, has been adapted to Italian Sign Language in order to assess the vocabulary of Italian deaf signing children. Thirty deaf and thirty hearing children and adolescents (aged 6–14 years) participated in the study. In the deaf signing group, half of the children attended a bilingual school. Results show no significant differences between deaf and hearing participants in the number of correct responses provided, but do show interesting differences in the lexical accuracy observed for individual items and in error types reported for sign and speech. In the deaf group, children attending a bilingual school performed significantly better than those who did not attend a bilingual programme.

When addressing linguistic problems of prelingual deaf people, research in the field of deaf education has proven how technology can enhance the quality of content transmission and of student's learning experience. E-learning facilities allows reaching isolated groups of deaf learners and address their pedagogical needs through an immersive and challenging learning environment. We will describe the working framework of the FIRB-VISEL project, aimed at creating an interactive e-learning environment where deaf people can improve their linguistic skills in the local language. In order to address both signers and non signers, we focus on how to convey information and learning strategies without losing track of their learning advancements and their motivation. We found that embodiment theory and its application to education could be beneficial. In this paper, we outline the path we have followed in the development of learning objects based on embodiment theory and their application to the field of deaf education. © 2011 IADIS.