SLAM Lab - Sign Language and Autism at Miami University

📢 New publication alert! (by Aaron Shield and SLAM Lab alum Ren Ferris)

Have you ever tried to learn the ASL fingerspelled alphabet from a chart or poster? You might be surprised at how much variation there is across different materials—and how that might affect learning.

In our new study, we analyzed 52 commonly available depictions of the ASL alphabet—think posters, flashcards, handouts—and looked closely at how each letter is visually represented. We examined factors like:
• Perspective (signer vs. addressee)
• Angle and direction of the hand
• Use of left vs. right hand
• Whether movement is shown
• Representations of racial/ethnic diversity
• And more

What we found: there's a lot of variability. For many letters, there’s no consistent way the handshape is portrayed—posing potential challenges for new learners trying to match what they see in real life with what's on the page.

We argue that educators and publishers can improve these materials by intentionally including multiple visual perspectives and more standardized representations.

Check out the full article here:
👉 https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/18/article/963490

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Congrats to MA student Hailey Browning on her upcoming thesis defense! Hailey built a novel research protocol from scratch investigating whether ASL might have a benefit for autistic children, specifically in terms of theory of mind and emotion recognition. This pilot study will lay the foundation for future work with a novel research population: bimodal bilinguals (hearing children of Deaf adults) with autism. This is a very promising study that will be carried on next year with the help of SLAM Lab undergraduates. Great work, Hailey!

Meet the members of the Miami University SL@M Lab. We are super excited to be working on this research study.