Explore this unique opportunity to join UCL's prestigious Division of Psychology and Language Sciences as a Research Assistant. Engage in a Wellcome-funded, three-year project led by Prof. Mairéad MacSweeney, focusing on the role of visual communication skills in reading development among young deaf children. This fixed-term role offers a chance to register for a PhD at UCL. Knowledge of British Sign Language (BSL) is a requirement.
37
7/19/2023
Language, whether spoken or signed, is arguably Homo sapiens’ greatest achievement. Although most children seemingly acquire language without effort, for others the acquisition task is more challenging.
In this lecture, Chloë Marshall will argue that studying these challenges and finding out how learners overcome them informs us about the cognitive processes involved in language acquisition and also informs us about how we can support language acquisition in all learners.
14
7/3/2023
Meet Kearsy Cormier, the Director of the Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre (DCAL), as she warmly welcomes you to the world of DCAL’s innovative research. DCAL boasts a multidisciplinary team of experts from fields such as linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience. They are committed to investigating how deaf individuals engage with, comprehend, and learn languages, as well as understanding the cognitive processes unique to deaf people. The research conducted at DCAL has been groundbreaking, shedding light on language processing in the brain, the influence of language variation on sign language structure, and how language is processed by both deaf children and adults. These insights are not only integral for advancing the scientific knowledge in this domain but are also invaluable in informing educational practices and clinical interventions tailored for the deaf community. Explore DCAL's website to learn more about their mission and groundbreaking discoveries.
625
6/8/2023
We are pleased to announce that the Deafness Cognition and Language (DCAL) Research Centre
at University College London has an exciting opportunity for
three, one-week paid placements.
As a paid research intern,
you can learn first-hand what is involved in conducting research
in the areas of linguistics, psycholinguistics
and language development
in the context of deafness and sign language.
Alternatively, as a professional services intern,
you can see what goes on behind the scenes of a research centre
and work in our Professional Services team,
this may include but not limited to science communication,
event management
and community engagement.
You will gain valuable higher education experience in these areas.
28
2/2/2023
We were saddened by the passing of Frances Elton earlier this year. Frances worked at DCAL for many years. Frances had a long career in research and teaching and her work influenced a great many people. We will be holding a memorial event in honour of Frances to celebrate her life’s work. This will be on Saturday 21st January from 2pm to 5.30pm. There will be various speakers and we will be doing a premier showing of the final version of ‘Lightwave’, a film developed by Rubbena Aurengzeb-Tariq and Prof. Bencie Woll, see: https://www.rubbena.com/lightwave-trellis-2020
26
12/2/2022
Sign Language Linguistics Research
This year we had several publications in sign linguistics, including a paper on sociolinguistic variation in mouthing in the BSL Corpus, and a chapter on the future of sign language corpora in a new edited volume on sign language corpora from Gallaudet University Press. We have continued work on several sign linguistics projects including writing up papers on sign sentence types, questions, and negation in BSL, and collecting data for a project on sign order for an ESRC funded project on language evolution. In sign language technology, we published a conference paper on tools for automatically identifying sign boundaries. With colleagues from University of Surrey and Oxford, we organised a workshop on Sign Language Recognition Translation and Production. We also continue to work on EASIER, a large EU project on automatic translation processes for European sign languages with partners around Europe including the European Union of the Deaf.
31
12/2/2022
BSL GCSE
Another area that Bencie is working is the BSL GCSE. She is currently a member of the working group (together with Robert Adam) developing the BSL GCSE curriculum for England. Work was very delayed because of Covid but it’s now expected that the curriculum will go out for consultation in January with the aim of the course starting in schools in 2025. At the same time, Bencie been working with the Welsh government to develop the BSL Curriculum for Wales. There are a lot of associated resources and training that will be needed to support a BSL GCSE: the need to train deaf teachers of BSL for work in schools, the development of textbooks, videos and guides for teachers and learners.
28
12/2/2022
Language-comprehension skills, such as vocabulary knowledge, syntactic abilities, and text comprehension, have found to be important skills particularly in bilingual contexts as a foundation in the development of literacy skills in a second language. Because there is no assessment in place that taps deaf children’s comprehension of BSL texts through literal and inferential dimensions, this project will first develop a new BSL comprehension task and then explore the relationship between language-comprehension skills in British Sign Language (BSL) as a first language, and the relationship between BSL text comprehension skills and English text comprehension skills.
31
6/14/2022