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.
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6/8/2023
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
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12/2/2022
Bencie’s Festschrift
On 9th November we held a Festschrift symposium to celebrate the academic career of Prof. Bencie Woll, DCAL’s founding Director. Current and past colleagues discussed Bencie’s legacy across sociolinguistics, neuroscience and psychology, as well as her efforts to promote changes in public policy, public engagement and capacity building. Tributes celebrating her multidisciplinary long-lasting impact came from her collaborators from around the world, who joined in person and online. To honour Bencie’s scientific and social legacy, we have started a fundraiser for the ‘Bencie Woll Award’ for early career researchers in sign languages. You can contribute to this initiative. It was a wonderful day of celebration and togetherness! If you missed this event, a recording of the event will be available on our website soon.
Congratulations Bencie on your amazing career and achievements which continue to amaze! At the moment Bencie is working with the producers of Sign 2 Win,
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12/2/2022
The current pandemic has changed the ways in which we communicate and work, in many cases with more profound effects for deaf and hard of hearing people. Throughout the pandemic, members of DCAL developed a range of strategies and guidelines to adapt to these new challenges. These include:
• Remote working guidelines to ensure that deaf people could maximise their online participation in virtual meetings and events, and reduce visual demands and fatigue.
• COVID-19 BSL e-books for children, in collaboration with Frank Barnes School for Deaf Children. These e-books provide deaf children who use BSL with direct access to crucial information about coronavirus and its impact on everyday life.
• Information about the impact of face masks on communication. We wrote a statement explaining communication issues due to face coverings, where we highlight the main challenges and also explain some possible adaptations.
• How to caption videos. As part of our commitment to provide accessible info
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12/8/2021
This year we have conducted studies on BSL grammar – including work on sign order, facial expressions and head movements. We have also focussed on sign language technology, including development of tools for automatic translation between BSL and English.
We finalised some work on language attitudes towards BSL in the deaf community. This included a new publication about regional variation. Many of us know that there is a lot of regional variation in BSL, with different regions of the U.K. having different signs for colours, places, numbers, etc. Less is known about how deaf people feel about regional variation, whether or not they viewed regional variation in a positive manner.
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12/7/2021
Dr. Kate Rowley was recently successful in being awarded a grant from the ESRC. Congratulations! The aim of the project is to investigate the role of language comprehension in deaf children who use BSL and how this may impact reading comprehension. Dr. Patrick Rosenburg will be joining the DCAL team to work full time on this project as a post-doctoral researcher when it starts in January 2022. Patrick previously developed an American Sign Language (ASL) Comprehension Test.
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12/7/2021
While face coverings have been important in reducing the spread of Covid-19, it has affected human communication, particularly for deaf and hard-of-hearing people (HoH). In collaboration with Dr. Eva Gutierrez-Sigut (project lead), lecturer at the University of Essex, Dr. Kate Rowley (co-investigator) carried out a survey exploring the impact of face coverings on communication. Responses from 395 deaf/HoH people from the U.K. and Spain revealed that despite difficulties in communication, most deaf/HoH wore masks. Deaf people who became deaf later in life struggled the most with communication and reported lower levels of wellbeing. All deaf people, whether they became deaf early or late in life, reported that they were missing more information and felt more disconnected from society.
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12/7/2021
UCL and DCAL started opening the doors for Covid-safe research in April 2021. This has been a slow process, but with many interesting projects now up and running. If you are interested in being involved in our future research please do sign up here.
We have summarised some highlights of our recent research below and you can find out about all of our ongoing projects here. We are working on creating short summaries of some of our specific research studies in BSL and English. Here is the first one.
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12/7/2021