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Copyright of Italian Journal of Health Education, Sport & Inclusive Didactics is the property of Edizioni Universitarie Romane and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Italian Sign Language (LIS) education is going through a profound transformation in Italy. Since its recognition, in 2021, as the natural language of the Deaf minority, and the definition of LIS interpreters as the designated professionals to mediate communication needs involving signers in all public settings, the debate has increased in the attempt to determine the content and purpose(s) of the interpreters' training (in Higher Education?) courses. While formal education in sign language (SL) is becoming increasingly important for interpreters' training, and universities are opening experimental courses for them, the linguistic education of deaf children and the vocational training of Deaf adults as SL teachers are gaining new attention. In light of these changes, I discuss the state of the art of general education for the deaf in Italy, glancing at the steps that led to LIS recognition, and the training of bimodal bilingual (deaf) children in public education. Past choices influence the present. The topic will be covered from a historical and interdisciplinary perspective, following the evolution in the social as well as political decisions that influenced deaf education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attitude role shift is a sign language strategy to report someone else's utterance or thought. It has been analyzed either as a kind of demonstration or, alternatively, as a complex construction involving subordination plus a context-shifting operator. The present work reports the results of a sentence-to-picture matching task developed in three different sign languages (Italian Sign Language, French Sign Language and Catalan Sign Language) with the aim of providing experimental evidence about the nature of role shift. The task assessed the comprehension of indexical first-person pronouns in various syntactic contexts with and without role shift. We showed that constructions with role shift, which require context-shifting for the first-person pronoun, are never easier to comprehend than constructions without role shift that do not require context-shifting. In some cases, they are even more difficult. Additionally, we show that, in Italian Sign Language only, sentences in which the role shifted first-person pronoun is in object position are more difficult than sentences in which it is in subject position. We argue that this can be interpreted as an intervention effect and that this is an argument in favor of positing a context-shifting operator in the periphery of the role shift clause. Considering that the population of adult Deaf signers includes, besides native signers, a majority of individuals with a more or less severe delayed first language exposure, the second goal of this paper is to study the effects of age of exposure on comprehension of sentences with role shift. In the three languages under investigation, we found that native signers generally outperformed non-native signers in sentences with role shift and in subordinate clauses without role shift. This confirms that delayed language exposure has a lasting impact on adults' comprehension of subordinate clauses of various degrees of complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Italian Journal of Health Education, Sport & Inclusive Didactics is the property of Edizioni Universitarie Romane and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Negation can be considered a shared social action that develops since early infancy with very basic acts of refusals or rejection. Inspired by an approach to the embodiment of concepts known as Multiple Representation Theories (MRT, henceforth), the present paper explores negation as an embodied action that relies on both sensorimotor and linguistic/social information. Despite the different variants, MRT accounts share the basic ideas that both linguistic/social and sensorimotor information concur to the processes of concepts formation and representation and that the balance between these components depends on the kind of concept, the context, or the performed task. In the present research we will apply the MRT framework for exploring negation in Italian sign language (LIS). The nature of negation in LIS has been explored in continuity with the co-speech gesture where negative elements are encoded through differentiated prosodic and gestural strategies across languages. Data have been collected in naturalistic settings that may allow a much wider understanding of negation both in speech and in spoken language with a semi-structured interview. Five LIS participants with age range 30–80 were recruited and interviewed with the aim of understanding the continuity between gesture and sign in negation. Results highlight that negation utterances mirror the functions of rejection, non-existence and denial that have been described in language acquisition both in deaf and hearing children. These different steps of acquisition of negation show a different balance between sensorimotor, linguistic and social information in the construction of negative meaning that the MRT is able to enlighten. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Negation can be considered a shared social action that develops since early infancy with very basic acts of refusals or rejection. Inspired by an approach to the embodiment of concepts known as Multiple Representation Theories (MRT, henceforth), the present paper explores negation as an embodied action that relies on both sensorimotor and linguistic/social information. Despite the different variants, MRT accounts share the basic ideas that both linguistic/social and sensorimotor information concur to the processes of concepts formation and representation and that the balance between these components depends on the kind of concept, the context, or the performed task. In the present research we will apply the MRT framework for exploring negation in Italian sign language (LIS). The nature of negation in LIS has been explored in continuity with the co-speech gesture where negative elements are encoded through differentiated prosodic and gestural strategies across languages. Data have been collected in naturalistic settings that may allow a much wider understanding of negation both in speech and in spoken language with a semi-structured interview. Five LIS participants with age range 30–80 were recruited and interviewed with the aim of understanding the continuity between gesture and sign in negation. Results highlight that negation utterances mirror the functions of rejection, non-existence and denial that have been described in language acquisition both in deaf and hearing children. These different steps of acquisition of negation show a different balance between sensorimotor, linguistic and social information in the construction of negative meaning that the MRT is able to enlighten.

This article offers an overview of the current situation of sign language interpreters operating in Italy, with reference to the wider European context. Although the profession is not yet formally recognized in Italy, it has gained more and more visibility in recent years thanks to TV broadcasting. However, the characteristics and working fields of sign language interpreters are still largely unknown to non-professionals. This article starts with a description of the main working language used by interpreters, namely Italian Sign Language (LIS), and of its main users (Deaf people), who can be considered a sociocultural community. Then, the article provides an overview of the historical evolution of interpreters, focusing on training options and professional contexts. Particular emphasis is given to the current legislation concerning sign language interpreters at the national and international levels, with a focus on the national associations of interpreters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1980s, the renewed interest of linguists in deafness and sign language revealed the emergence of a remarkable resilience within the Deaf community. Deaf people expressed the need to be recognized as social actors and possible precursors of a new way of seeing the world, which was the consequence of their unique, natural, visualgestural language: sign language. This change in research and attitude resulted in a new way of looking at and understanding deafness, which could no longer be seen as a physical deficit to be treated medically. Consequently, sign language interpreters had to change their entire perspective on translation and shift from an approach that saw the interpreter as a helper working for the Deaf, to one that represented the interpreter as a bilingual professional bridging two cultures. This new perspective overturned the meaning of accessibility, which nowadays focuses on the cultural richness that the Deaf community can bring to society: the so-called Deaf Gain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a study of French Sign Language (LSF) temporal constructions. While we know from spoken language research that temporal constructions can be expressed through a variety of syntactic strategies such as subordination, juxtaposition, and coordination, finding their equivalent in sign languages is often a challenge due to the absence of overt complementizers and other function words such as coordinators. This study explores temporal constructions in LSF and frames them within a broad typological perspective. We show that LSF temporal clauses are very different from those of Italian Sign language (LIS) studied by Aristodemo (2017). Specifically, LSF temporal constructions are composed of two coordinated clauses and the temporal marker is integrated into the second conjunct. LIS temporal clauses, on the other hand, are composed of a main and a subordinated clause. This finding shows that the typological categories found in spoken language are also relevant for sign language studies.

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).

Surface Electromyography (EMG) and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors are gaining the attention of the research community as data sources for automatic sign language recognition. In this regard, we provide a dataset of EMG and IMU data collected using the Myo Gesture Control Armband, during the execution of the 26 gestures of the Italian Sign Language alphabet. For each gesture, 30 data acquisitions were executed, composing a total of 780 samples included in the dataset. The gestures were performed by the same subject (male, 24 years old) in lab settings. EMG and IMU data were collected in a 2 seconds time window, at a sampling frequency of 200 Hz.

The motivation for the project was the necessity of finding solutions to situations characterized by difficulty in communication, such as trading between different countries, immigrants unable to speak the language, or between hearing and deaf people who use sign language. These and other cases can be solved thanks to interpreting services. Yet because of educational commitments of professionals, organizational time, budget, and locations, it is not always possible to avail of an on-site interpreter. In this context, technology offers a solution through remote interpretation. The present draws inspiration from the research project "VEASYT Live! for conference: linguistic and technological solutions for the supply of video remote interpreting services in conference settings". The work was financed by the European Social Fund and took place between 2016 and 2017 in the Linguistic and Cultural Compared Studies Department of Ca' Foscari University of Venice in partnership with VEASYT srl, a company that developed a video remote interpreting (VRI) service in both vocal languages and Italian Sign Language. The aim of the research is to develop VRI for conference situations such as seminars, conferences and academic lectures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a comprehensive discussion of the cardinal numeral system of Italian Sign Language. At the lexical level, we present the different formational strategies used to generate cardinal numerals and we provide evidence that in the younger generations of signers, the sign one has lost the function of indefinite determiner and is now used as a cardinal only. At the syntactic level, we show that the attested variation in the ordering between the cardinal and the noun is in part due to definiteness and contrastive focus. We account for this variation within the cartographic approach to syntax. Finally, we offer a principled explanation for the reason why cardinals inside Measure Phrases are not subject to word order variation, but always precede the measure noun. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract When we utter something with the intention to communicate the opposite of what we are literally producing, assuming a mocking attitude towards our interlocutor, we are making use of irony. As far as we know, despite the vast literature on the status of irony markers (meta-communicative clues alerting the interlocutor that the utterance requires an ironic interpretation) in spoken languages, no research has been devoted at identifying irony markers in those languages that exploit the visual modality to convey meaning, i.e., sign languages. To start filling this gap, we administered to four Deaf native Italian Sign Language signers a Discourse Completion Task to obtain a semi-spontaneous elicitation of 10 minimal pairs of ironic/literal remarks expressing either compliments or criticisms. The analysis of this corpus revealed that: i) sentence meaning is expressed manually through the polarity of the evaluative lexical sign, ii) signer's attitude is expressed non-manually through mouth-corners up and down, iii) ironic remarks show a prolonged articulation, and iv) irony might be further signaled by non-obligatory non-manual and manual cues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data from Italian Sign Language provide evidence in favor of a degree-based analysis over a non-degree based analysis for gradable adjectives and comparative constructions. Morphological and phonological constraints identify a class of gradable adjectives in which degree variables can be overtly represented as ordered points established in the signing space by an iconic mapping. When this happens the visible degree becomes available as an antecedent for a later pronoun, as in the nominal, temporal and modal domain, showing that the same anaphoric system is at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of pronominal strength (e.g., Cardinaletti & Starke 1999) lead one to expect that sign language, just like spoken language, can have morphologically distinct strong pronominals. We suggest that American Sign Language (ASL) and French Sign Language (LSF) might have such pronominals, characterized here by the fact that they may associate with only even in the absence of prosodically marked focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine agent backgrounding in Italian Sign Language (LIS). Specifically, we are interested in identifying and describing the strategies used by LIS signers to reduce referentiality. On the basis of low-referential contexts (cf. questionnaire in the Introduction chapter), we recorded target sentences containing potential markers of agent backgrounding and asked three LIS native signers to provide felicity judgments on them using a 7-point scale. We discuss agent-backgrounding strategies of different types: (i) manual, (ii) non-manual, and (iii) syntactic. Overall, our study shows that the combination of raised eyebrows and mouth-corners down associated with the existential quantifier someone and the sign person makes the agent-backgrounding reading more prominent. Other strategies that can be used in LIS to reduce referentiality are free relatives, perspective shift, and null subject. We also investigate in more detail the semantic status of someone, person, and the null subject through well-established tests from the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented which discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the R-impersonal reference in Catalan Sign Language (CSL), Workshop on R-impersonal pronouns in Sign Language, and R-impersonal strategies for Italian Sign Language, French Sign Language, and CSL.

In this paper, we investigate structural aspects of nominal modification in Italian Sign Language (LIS), a language with a relatively flexible word order. In order to tackle the issue, this study combines different approaches, including generalizations from typological universals on word order, their formal counterparts, and a variationist approach to language facts. Data come from the largest corpus of LIS currently available. Despite the absence of categorical rules, our mixed approach shows that LIS data are consistent with the general tenets of nominal modification. Results from the statistical analysis indicate that the attested language-internal variability is constrained both by linguistic and social factors. Specifically, a fine-grained structure of nominal modification is able to capture the internal variability of LIS. Processing effects, age, gender, and early exposure to the language also play a relevant role in determining order preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By providing evidence that sign language is an autonomous language, research has contributed to various changes both within and beyond the signing communities. The aim of this article is to present an example of how sign language change is driven not only by language-internal factors but also by changes in language perception, as well as in the changing groups of users and the contexts of use. Drawing from data on Italian Sign Language collected at a sign language research center in Italy for more than thirty years, the present study shows how language research was itself a major impetus for a new linguistic awareness. It also relates how changes in language attitude have influenced new linguistic practices and forced Italian signers to think about the rules that govern the use of their language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Languages have diverse strategies for marking agentivity and number. These strategies are negotiated to create combinatorial systems. We consider the emergence of these strategies by studying features of movement in a young sign language in Nicaragua (NSL). We compare two age cohorts of Nicaraguan signers (NSL1 and NSL2), adult homesigners in Nicaragua (deaf individuals creating a gestural system without linguistic input), signers of American and Italian Sign Languages (ASL and LIS), and hearing individuals asked to gesture silently. We find that all groups use movement axis and repetition to encode agentivity and number, suggesting that these properties are grounded in action experiences common to all participants. We find another feature – unpunctuated repetition – in the sign systems (ASL, LIS, NSL, Homesign) but not in silent gesture. Homesigners and NSL1 signers use the unpunctuated form, but limit its use to No-Agent contexts; NSL2 signers use the form across No-Agent and Agent contexts. A single individual can thus construct a marker for number without benefit of a linguistic community (homesign), but generalizing this form across agentive conditions requires an additional step. This step does not appear to be achieved when a linguistic community is first formed (NSL1), but requires transmission across generations of learners (NSL2).

By providing evidence that sign language is an autonomous language, research has contributed to various changes both within and beyond the signing communities. The aim of this article is to show an example of how sign language change is driven not only by language internal factors but also by changes in language perception, as well as in the changing groups of users and the contexts of use. Drawing from data collected at a sign language research centre in Italy on Italian Sign Language during a time span of over thirty years, the present study will show how language research was a major impetus for a new linguistic awareness and changes in language attitude has influenced new linguistic practices and has forced Italian signers to think about rules governing the use of their language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze a hitherto undescribed case of ellipsis in Italian Sign Language (LIS) and show that it has common properties with VP ellipsis in languages like English. For example, the ellipsis site can contain a wh -trace and semantic restrictions on the type of predicate that can be omitted are only derivative. We thus propose a phonological deletion approach for the LIS construction. We also consider the issue of how the content of the ellipsis site is recovered from its linguistic antecedent. We present new arguments for a syntactic identity condition, although a limited number of mismatches between the ellipsis site and its antecedent, notably including vehicle change cases, must be accommodated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sign languages represent the most natural way to communicate for deaf and hard of hearing. However, there are often barriers between people using this kind of languages and hearing people, typically oriented to express themselves by means of oral languages. To facilitate the social inclusiveness in everyday life for deaf minorities, technology can play an important role. Indeed many attempts have been recently made by the scientific community to develop automatic translation tools. Unfortunately, not many solutions are actually available for the Italian Sign Language (Lingua Italiana dei Segni-LIS) case study, specially for what concerns the recognition task. In this paper, the authors want to face such a lack, in particular addressing the signer-independent case study, i.e., when the signers in the testing set are to included in the training set. From this perspective, the proposed algorithm represents the first real attempt in the LIS case. The automatic recognizer is based on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and video features have been extracted using the OpenCV open source library. The effectiveness of the HMM system is validated by a comparative evaluation with Support Vector Machine approach. The video material used to train the recognizer and testing its performance consists in a database that the authors have deliberately created by involving 10 signers and 147 isolated-sign videos for each signer. The database is publicly available. Computer simulations have shown the effectiveness of the adopted methodology, with recognition accuracies comparable to those obtained by the automatic tools developed for other sign languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The position of wh-items is one of the most striking features of the syntax of sign languages (SLs). In contrast to spoken languages, where wh-words are generally found either clause-initially or in situ, SLs allow wh-signs in situ, in clause-final position (preferred for many SLs), or repeated in two different positions of the clause. Moreover, in many cases all these options coexist in the same language (and even within a single signer). Several proposals in the theoretical literature showed how grammars are able to generate such constructions; however, none of the proposals addresses the issue of what factors determine the choice of these options. We present corpus evidence showing that both linguistic and social factors constrain the distribution of wh-signs in LIS (Lingua dei Segni Italiana, Italian Sign Language). The result of multivariate analysis suggests that LIS is undergoing a grammatical change and becoming less like spoken Italian with respect to the position of wh-signs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]