Ila Parasnis - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Ila Parasnis
Rochester Institute of Technology, Jun 1, 2008
Following the recognition of sign languages as natural languages, with their own lexicons and gra... more Following the recognition of sign languages as natural languages, with their own lexicons and grammars, there has been a shift from the view that Deaf people should be regarded simply as disabled individuals. Research over the past 30 years has completely changed our understanding of the nature of the Deaf communities of the world and their sign languages (Klima & Bellugi 1979, Kyle & Woll 1985). Earlier beliefs that sign languages iverejust unstructured gesture systems, without grammar, or that they were manual representations of spoken language, or that they were universally understood, have been replaced with recognition of the interrelated development of sign languages and communities of Deaf people (Fischer & Lane 1993). Since the mid 1980s, recognition has shifted again to a recognition of Deaf people as constituting linguistic minorities with their own culture, and therefore viewing Deaf communities as essentially bilingual and bicultural (Padden & Humphries 1988, Wilcox 1989). Parasnis' book provides a useful contribution to understanding Deaf people as forming a bilingual-bicultural minority group. The book approaches the subject from three different angles. Part I presents an overview of current approaches to bilingualism-biculturalism. Parasnis sets the context for the book with an introductory chapter. This is followed by three chapters: Grosjean on the psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and social psychology of the bilingual individual; Hakuta and Mostafapour on the history and politics of bilingualism and bilingual education in the United States, and Hamers on cognitive and linguistic development by bilingual children. This set of chapters provides a very useful introduction to readers in the deafness field who may not have much knowledge of the bilingualism literature. Part I1 consists of eight chapters discussing American research on a variety of areas relating to psychosocial and educational experiences of Deaf children and adults. The chapters vary substantially in length and depth. With the exception of the chapters by Padden and Holcomb, all the authors are on the faculty of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester, NY. This highlights a weakness here and in subsequent chapters. Although the title might suggest otherwise, all chapters deal only with the American experience, and as such, is likely to leave readers from outside the United States with a degree of frustration at the absence of any information on the Deaf experience of bilingualism and biculturalism in any other country. This is particularly regrettable because of the existence of a substantial literature in the field, particularly from Europe and South America.
American Annals of the Deaf, 2005
American Annals of the Deaf, 1996
American Annals of the Deaf, 2000
Deaf individuals typically experience English language difficulties at all levels of linguistic k... more Deaf individuals typically experience English language difficulties at all levels of linguistic knowledge. Hearing individuals with English language learning disabilities (LD) can exhibit the same kinds of English language difficulties as deaf individuals. Although the existence of deaf individuals who also have LD has long been recognized, no definite criteria for identifying them exist, partly because of the confounding effects of deafness and LD on English language development. Despite the confound, previous surveys suggest that teachers believe atypical English-language behavior is a potential diagnostic marker for LD in deaf individuals. In the present study, a survey solicited the intuitions of experienced teachers and tutors of English to deaf college students regarding the degree of difficulty deaf students with and without LD might be expected to have in dealing with 30 specific English language phenomena. Spelling knowledge and a variety of English discourse, lexical syntactic, and morphological phenomena emerged as candidates for further study as potential markers of LD in the deaf population.
American Annals of the Deaf, 1980
ABSTRACT The paper presents four research projects in process in the Communication Sciences Labor... more ABSTRACT The paper presents four research projects in process in the Communication Sciences Laboratory at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. These projects illustrate four broad areas of research on the relationships between higher order information processing systems and the communication skills and problems exhibited by deaf people. (Author)
American Annals of the Deaf, 2005
Cultural and Language Diversity and the Deaf Experience, 1996
This study investigated the Stroop effect with deaf and hearing bilingual individuals and whether... more This study investigated the Stroop effect with deaf and hearing bilingual individuals and whether there is a positive relationship between the Stroop effect and English language proficiency of deaf bilinguals. The Stroop effect refers to the interference caused by incmigruent semantic information in naming colors (e.g., when subjects must name the ink color of the word "red" printed in green ink). Subjects were 16 congenitally, severe to profoundly deaf American college students who were fluent in sign language. In addition eight hearing fluent signers were also tested. The response times and accuracy on a color-word matching task were evaluated. Both deaf and hearing signers showed the expected general Stroop effect. However, deaf signers were better than hearing signers in suppressing interference created by incongruent lexical information. The magnitude of the Stroop effect was not related to English reading skills in deaf Ftudents. (DB) ********************************...
This study investigated the expressed attitudes of deaf adults as well as hearing parents and tea... more This study investigated the expressed attitudes of deaf adults as well as hearing parents and teachers of deaf children in Israel toward career choices for deaf and hearing people by asking the participants to rate the suitability of 14 professions for deaf and hearing people. The results, in general, were consistent with those of other studies in the United States, England, Italy, South Africa and India with hearing teachers and parents of deaf children, which indicated that the hearing status of imagined advisees selectively influenced attitudes toward the suitability of certain professions. Deaf adults in Israel gave signiflcantly lower ratings for deaf advisees on 10 out of 14 professions and did not And any of the professions to be more suitable for a deaf advisee when compared to a hearing advisee. These results are in contrast to those found by Parasnis, Samar and Mandke (1996) with deaf adults in India. Implications ofthese flndings
American Annals of the Deaf, 1997
Parasnis is an associate professor in the department of Applied Language and Cognition Research a... more Parasnis is an associate professor in the department of Applied Language and Cognition Research at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY. Her primary research interests are in visual cognition, bilingualismbiculturalism, and deaf education. The perspective that deaf people' should be regarded primarily as a cultural and language minority group rather than as individuals with an audiological disability is gathering support among educators, linguists, and researchers involved in deaf education. There has been a small revolutionaryshift in deaf education away from the medical model of deaf people as disabled to the sociocultural model of deaf people as a minority group with its own language and culture (e.g., Johnson, Lidell, & Erting, 1989). Several books have been published discussing the sociocultural context in which deaf people live and its relevance for deaf education (e.g., Lane 1992; Lane, Hoffineister, & Bahan, 1995...
Part I. Cultural and Language Diversity: An Overview: 1. On interpreting the deaf experience with... more Part I. Cultural and Language Diversity: An Overview: 1. On interpreting the deaf experience within the context of cultural and language diverstiy Ila Parasnis 2. Living with two languages and two cultures Francois Grosjean 3. Perspectives from the history and the politics of bilingualism and bilingual education in the United States Kenji Hakuta and Elizabeth Feldman Mostafapour 4. Cognitive and language development of bilingual children Josiane F. Hamers Part II. Cultural and Language Diversity: Impact on the Deaf Experience: 5. From the cultural to the bicultural: the modern deaf community Carol A. Padden 6. Early bilingual lives of deaf children Carol A. Padden 7. Communication experiences of deaf people: an ethnographic account Susan Foster 8. Marginality, biculturalism and social identity of deaf people R. Greg Emerton 9. Attitudes of the deaf community toward political activism Gerry C. Bateman 10. Cultural and language diversity in the curriculum: toward reflective practice B...
Deaf students' attitudes toward racial/ethnic diversity, campus climate, and role models"... more Deaf students' attitudes toward racial/ethnic diversity, campus climate, and role models" (2005). EAF COLLEGE STUDENTS' attitudes toward a variety of issues related to racial/ethnic diversity were surveyed by contacting all racial/ethnic minority deaf students and a random sample of Caucasian deaf students attending the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID), Rochester Institute of Technology; 38% completed the survey. Although racial/ethnic groups similarly perceived NTID's commitment and efforts related to diversity, they differed significantly on some items related to campus climate and role models. Furthermore, the racial/ethnic minority groups differed from each other in their perceptions of campus comfort level, racial conflict, friendship patterns, and availability of role models. Educational satisfaction was positively correlated with campus comfort level; both correlated negatively with perception of discrimination and racial conflict. Qualitative...
To determine if imagery mediates memory for signs and words, 80 sign-language-fluent Ss -- half o... more To determine if imagery mediates memory for signs and words, 80 sign-language-fluent Ss -- half of whom were congenitally deaf and half of whom were normal-hearing -- were tested by varying the imagery values of stimuli. The relative efficacy of word and sign codes in processing and retrieving information was studied by systematically varying the mode of presentation and the mode of retrieval of information, thus producing four conditions of the experiment: sign-sign, sign-word, word-sign, and word-word. Among the findings were that there was an overall performance difference in recall between deaf and hearing students, with hearing Ss doing better than deaf Ss; and that, more importantly, there was an overall imagery effect which showed that imagery facilitated memory for words and signs for both deaf and hearing Ss. This facilitating effect was, however, absent in the word-sign condition for both groups. Findings suggested that words and signs are processed in a similar fashion. (...
This study investigated the Stroop effect with deaf and hearing bilingual individuals and whether... more This study investigated the Stroop effect with deaf and hearing bilingual individuals and whether there is a positive relationship between the Stroop effect and English language proficiency of deaf bilinguals. The Stroop effect refers to the interference caused by incongruent semantic information in naming colors (e.g., when subjects must name the ink color of the word "red" printed in green ink). Subjects were 16 congenitally, severe to profoundly deaf American college students who were fluent in sign language. In addition eight hearing fluent signers were also tested. The response times and accuracy on a color-word matching task were evaluated. Both deaf and hearing signers showed the expected general Stroop effect. However, deaf signers were better than hearing signers in suppressing interference created by incongruent lexical information. The magnitude of the Stroop effect was not related to English reading skills in deaf students. (DB)
Line drawings of four animals, each differing in size and orientation, were paired with each othe... more Line drawings of four animals, each differing in size and orientation, were paired with each other in all possible combinations and presented in a successive matching task. In the first experiment, the subjects responded "same" if the stimuli had the same name. The "same" RT was faster for physically identical stimuli than for stimuli that differed on one or two dimensions but still had the same name. "Same" responses were about twice as slow as "different" responses, a finding confirmed in the second experiment, in which subjects responded "same" only to physically identical stimuli. It was suggested that slower "same" responses may result from a general picture-processing strategy in which differences were noticed faster than similarities. This research was conducted when both authors were affiliated with the University of Rochester. We thank Dennis Fisher for his kind permission to use the tachistoscope at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds and, when it was on loan at the University of Rochester, Alfred O. Dick for his substantial help in programming and data analysis, and James Qark for drawing superb stimuli. Requests for reprints should be sent to: lla Parasnis,
Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1979
The hypotheses that deaf students would be more field-dependent than hearing students and that th... more The hypotheses that deaf students would be more field-dependent than hearing students and that their competence in communication skills would be positively related to field-independence were supported for a group of 77 male and 67 female deaf students. Step-wise multiple regression analyses of the data showed that for females spatial skills followed by communication skills were significant predictors of field-independence; for males spatial skills followed by the extent of hearing loss were significant predictors of field-independence. Sex differences found on tests of field-independence and spatial relations were consistent with those obtained from the hearing population. It was suggested that socialization experiences and competence in communication skills may influence development of field-independence in deaf students.
… Signal and Array …, 1994
Page 1. WAVELET AND PRINCIPAL COMPONENTS EVOKED POTENTIALS IN PATIENTS WITH DEGENERATIVE RETINAL ... more Page 1. WAVELET AND PRINCIPAL COMPONENTS EVOKED POTENTIALS IN PATIENTS WITH DEGENERATIVE RETINAL DISEASES DECOMPOSITION OF PATTERN-REVERSAL VISUAL Vincent J. S ~ marl , ~ , ~ Gauri Kulkarni3 Vishwas Udpikar4 PS Damle ...
Rochester Institute of Technology, Jun 1, 2008
Following the recognition of sign languages as natural languages, with their own lexicons and gra... more Following the recognition of sign languages as natural languages, with their own lexicons and grammars, there has been a shift from the view that Deaf people should be regarded simply as disabled individuals. Research over the past 30 years has completely changed our understanding of the nature of the Deaf communities of the world and their sign languages (Klima & Bellugi 1979, Kyle & Woll 1985). Earlier beliefs that sign languages iverejust unstructured gesture systems, without grammar, or that they were manual representations of spoken language, or that they were universally understood, have been replaced with recognition of the interrelated development of sign languages and communities of Deaf people (Fischer & Lane 1993). Since the mid 1980s, recognition has shifted again to a recognition of Deaf people as constituting linguistic minorities with their own culture, and therefore viewing Deaf communities as essentially bilingual and bicultural (Padden & Humphries 1988, Wilcox 1989). Parasnis' book provides a useful contribution to understanding Deaf people as forming a bilingual-bicultural minority group. The book approaches the subject from three different angles. Part I presents an overview of current approaches to bilingualism-biculturalism. Parasnis sets the context for the book with an introductory chapter. This is followed by three chapters: Grosjean on the psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and social psychology of the bilingual individual; Hakuta and Mostafapour on the history and politics of bilingualism and bilingual education in the United States, and Hamers on cognitive and linguistic development by bilingual children. This set of chapters provides a very useful introduction to readers in the deafness field who may not have much knowledge of the bilingualism literature. Part I1 consists of eight chapters discussing American research on a variety of areas relating to psychosocial and educational experiences of Deaf children and adults. The chapters vary substantially in length and depth. With the exception of the chapters by Padden and Holcomb, all the authors are on the faculty of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester, NY. This highlights a weakness here and in subsequent chapters. Although the title might suggest otherwise, all chapters deal only with the American experience, and as such, is likely to leave readers from outside the United States with a degree of frustration at the absence of any information on the Deaf experience of bilingualism and biculturalism in any other country. This is particularly regrettable because of the existence of a substantial literature in the field, particularly from Europe and South America.
American Annals of the Deaf, 2005
American Annals of the Deaf, 1996
American Annals of the Deaf, 2000
Deaf individuals typically experience English language difficulties at all levels of linguistic k... more Deaf individuals typically experience English language difficulties at all levels of linguistic knowledge. Hearing individuals with English language learning disabilities (LD) can exhibit the same kinds of English language difficulties as deaf individuals. Although the existence of deaf individuals who also have LD has long been recognized, no definite criteria for identifying them exist, partly because of the confounding effects of deafness and LD on English language development. Despite the confound, previous surveys suggest that teachers believe atypical English-language behavior is a potential diagnostic marker for LD in deaf individuals. In the present study, a survey solicited the intuitions of experienced teachers and tutors of English to deaf college students regarding the degree of difficulty deaf students with and without LD might be expected to have in dealing with 30 specific English language phenomena. Spelling knowledge and a variety of English discourse, lexical syntactic, and morphological phenomena emerged as candidates for further study as potential markers of LD in the deaf population.
American Annals of the Deaf, 1980
ABSTRACT The paper presents four research projects in process in the Communication Sciences Labor... more ABSTRACT The paper presents four research projects in process in the Communication Sciences Laboratory at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. These projects illustrate four broad areas of research on the relationships between higher order information processing systems and the communication skills and problems exhibited by deaf people. (Author)
American Annals of the Deaf, 2005
Cultural and Language Diversity and the Deaf Experience, 1996
This study investigated the Stroop effect with deaf and hearing bilingual individuals and whether... more This study investigated the Stroop effect with deaf and hearing bilingual individuals and whether there is a positive relationship between the Stroop effect and English language proficiency of deaf bilinguals. The Stroop effect refers to the interference caused by incmigruent semantic information in naming colors (e.g., when subjects must name the ink color of the word "red" printed in green ink). Subjects were 16 congenitally, severe to profoundly deaf American college students who were fluent in sign language. In addition eight hearing fluent signers were also tested. The response times and accuracy on a color-word matching task were evaluated. Both deaf and hearing signers showed the expected general Stroop effect. However, deaf signers were better than hearing signers in suppressing interference created by incongruent lexical information. The magnitude of the Stroop effect was not related to English reading skills in deaf Ftudents. (DB) ********************************...
This study investigated the expressed attitudes of deaf adults as well as hearing parents and tea... more This study investigated the expressed attitudes of deaf adults as well as hearing parents and teachers of deaf children in Israel toward career choices for deaf and hearing people by asking the participants to rate the suitability of 14 professions for deaf and hearing people. The results, in general, were consistent with those of other studies in the United States, England, Italy, South Africa and India with hearing teachers and parents of deaf children, which indicated that the hearing status of imagined advisees selectively influenced attitudes toward the suitability of certain professions. Deaf adults in Israel gave signiflcantly lower ratings for deaf advisees on 10 out of 14 professions and did not And any of the professions to be more suitable for a deaf advisee when compared to a hearing advisee. These results are in contrast to those found by Parasnis, Samar and Mandke (1996) with deaf adults in India. Implications ofthese flndings
American Annals of the Deaf, 1997
Parasnis is an associate professor in the department of Applied Language and Cognition Research a... more Parasnis is an associate professor in the department of Applied Language and Cognition Research at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY. Her primary research interests are in visual cognition, bilingualismbiculturalism, and deaf education. The perspective that deaf people' should be regarded primarily as a cultural and language minority group rather than as individuals with an audiological disability is gathering support among educators, linguists, and researchers involved in deaf education. There has been a small revolutionaryshift in deaf education away from the medical model of deaf people as disabled to the sociocultural model of deaf people as a minority group with its own language and culture (e.g., Johnson, Lidell, & Erting, 1989). Several books have been published discussing the sociocultural context in which deaf people live and its relevance for deaf education (e.g., Lane 1992; Lane, Hoffineister, & Bahan, 1995...
Part I. Cultural and Language Diversity: An Overview: 1. On interpreting the deaf experience with... more Part I. Cultural and Language Diversity: An Overview: 1. On interpreting the deaf experience within the context of cultural and language diverstiy Ila Parasnis 2. Living with two languages and two cultures Francois Grosjean 3. Perspectives from the history and the politics of bilingualism and bilingual education in the United States Kenji Hakuta and Elizabeth Feldman Mostafapour 4. Cognitive and language development of bilingual children Josiane F. Hamers Part II. Cultural and Language Diversity: Impact on the Deaf Experience: 5. From the cultural to the bicultural: the modern deaf community Carol A. Padden 6. Early bilingual lives of deaf children Carol A. Padden 7. Communication experiences of deaf people: an ethnographic account Susan Foster 8. Marginality, biculturalism and social identity of deaf people R. Greg Emerton 9. Attitudes of the deaf community toward political activism Gerry C. Bateman 10. Cultural and language diversity in the curriculum: toward reflective practice B...
Deaf students' attitudes toward racial/ethnic diversity, campus climate, and role models"... more Deaf students' attitudes toward racial/ethnic diversity, campus climate, and role models" (2005). EAF COLLEGE STUDENTS' attitudes toward a variety of issues related to racial/ethnic diversity were surveyed by contacting all racial/ethnic minority deaf students and a random sample of Caucasian deaf students attending the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID), Rochester Institute of Technology; 38% completed the survey. Although racial/ethnic groups similarly perceived NTID's commitment and efforts related to diversity, they differed significantly on some items related to campus climate and role models. Furthermore, the racial/ethnic minority groups differed from each other in their perceptions of campus comfort level, racial conflict, friendship patterns, and availability of role models. Educational satisfaction was positively correlated with campus comfort level; both correlated negatively with perception of discrimination and racial conflict. Qualitative...
To determine if imagery mediates memory for signs and words, 80 sign-language-fluent Ss -- half o... more To determine if imagery mediates memory for signs and words, 80 sign-language-fluent Ss -- half of whom were congenitally deaf and half of whom were normal-hearing -- were tested by varying the imagery values of stimuli. The relative efficacy of word and sign codes in processing and retrieving information was studied by systematically varying the mode of presentation and the mode of retrieval of information, thus producing four conditions of the experiment: sign-sign, sign-word, word-sign, and word-word. Among the findings were that there was an overall performance difference in recall between deaf and hearing students, with hearing Ss doing better than deaf Ss; and that, more importantly, there was an overall imagery effect which showed that imagery facilitated memory for words and signs for both deaf and hearing Ss. This facilitating effect was, however, absent in the word-sign condition for both groups. Findings suggested that words and signs are processed in a similar fashion. (...
This study investigated the Stroop effect with deaf and hearing bilingual individuals and whether... more This study investigated the Stroop effect with deaf and hearing bilingual individuals and whether there is a positive relationship between the Stroop effect and English language proficiency of deaf bilinguals. The Stroop effect refers to the interference caused by incongruent semantic information in naming colors (e.g., when subjects must name the ink color of the word "red" printed in green ink). Subjects were 16 congenitally, severe to profoundly deaf American college students who were fluent in sign language. In addition eight hearing fluent signers were also tested. The response times and accuracy on a color-word matching task were evaluated. Both deaf and hearing signers showed the expected general Stroop effect. However, deaf signers were better than hearing signers in suppressing interference created by incongruent lexical information. The magnitude of the Stroop effect was not related to English reading skills in deaf students. (DB)
Line drawings of four animals, each differing in size and orientation, were paired with each othe... more Line drawings of four animals, each differing in size and orientation, were paired with each other in all possible combinations and presented in a successive matching task. In the first experiment, the subjects responded "same" if the stimuli had the same name. The "same" RT was faster for physically identical stimuli than for stimuli that differed on one or two dimensions but still had the same name. "Same" responses were about twice as slow as "different" responses, a finding confirmed in the second experiment, in which subjects responded "same" only to physically identical stimuli. It was suggested that slower "same" responses may result from a general picture-processing strategy in which differences were noticed faster than similarities. This research was conducted when both authors were affiliated with the University of Rochester. We thank Dennis Fisher for his kind permission to use the tachistoscope at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds and, when it was on loan at the University of Rochester, Alfred O. Dick for his substantial help in programming and data analysis, and James Qark for drawing superb stimuli. Requests for reprints should be sent to: lla Parasnis,
Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1979
The hypotheses that deaf students would be more field-dependent than hearing students and that th... more The hypotheses that deaf students would be more field-dependent than hearing students and that their competence in communication skills would be positively related to field-independence were supported for a group of 77 male and 67 female deaf students. Step-wise multiple regression analyses of the data showed that for females spatial skills followed by communication skills were significant predictors of field-independence; for males spatial skills followed by the extent of hearing loss were significant predictors of field-independence. Sex differences found on tests of field-independence and spatial relations were consistent with those obtained from the hearing population. It was suggested that socialization experiences and competence in communication skills may influence development of field-independence in deaf students.
… Signal and Array …, 1994
Page 1. WAVELET AND PRINCIPAL COMPONENTS EVOKED POTENTIALS IN PATIENTS WITH DEGENERATIVE RETINAL ... more Page 1. WAVELET AND PRINCIPAL COMPONENTS EVOKED POTENTIALS IN PATIENTS WITH DEGENERATIVE RETINAL DISEASES DECOMPOSITION OF PATTERN-REVERSAL VISUAL Vincent J. S ~ marl , ~ , ~ Gauri Kulkarni3 Vishwas Udpikar4 PS Damle ...