RESUMO
For some deaf people, sign language is the preferred language, the one in which they feel most comfortable. However, there are very few assessment tools developed or adapted for sign languages. The aim of this study was to translate and adapt in Italian Sign Language (LIS) the Italian version of the Youth Quality of Life Instrument-Deaf and Hard of Hearing Module (YQOL-DHH). The YQOL-DHH is a questionnaire assessing health-related quality of life in young deaf people. The guidelines provided by the authors of the original version were followed. Further controls and changes were made to take into account variability in signers' linguistic skills. This work and availability of the YQOL-DHH questionnaire in LIS, in addition to the Italian version, will ensure accessibility for Italian deaf adolescents.
RESUMO
In spoken languages, face masks represent an obstacle to speech understanding and influence metacognitive judgments, reducing confidence and increasing effort while listening. To date, all studies on face masks and communication involved spoken languages and hearing participants, leaving us with no insight on how masked communication impacts on non-spoken languages. Here, we examined the effects of face masks on sign language comprehension and metacognition. In an online experiment, deaf participants (N = 60) watched three parts of a story signed without mask, with a transparent mask or with an opaque mask, and answered questions about story content, as well as their perceived effort, feeling of understanding, and confidence in their answers. Results showed that feeling of understanding and perceived effort worsened as the visual condition changed from no mask to transparent or opaque masks, while comprehension of the story was not significantly different across visual conditions. We propose that metacognitive effects could be due to the reduction of pragmatic, linguistic and para-linguistic cues from the lower face, hidden by the mask. This reduction could impact on lower-face linguistic components perception, attitude attribution, classification of emotions and prosody of a conversation, driving the observed effects on metacognitive judgments but leaving sign language comprehension substantially unchanged, even if with a higher effort. These results represent a novel step towards better understanding what drives metacognitive effects of face masks while communicating face to face and highlight the importance of including the metacognitive dimension in human communication research.
Assuntos
Metacognição , Humanos , Compreensão , Máscaras , Fala , Percepção AuditivaRESUMO
One of the most important challenges for embodied and grounded theories of cognition concerns the representation of abstract concepts, such as "freedom." Many embodied theories of abstract concepts have been proposed. Some proposals stress the similarities between concrete and abstract concepts showing that they are both grounded in perception and action system while other emphasize their difference favoring a multiple representation view. An influential view proposes that abstract concepts are mapped to concrete ones through metaphors. Furthermore, some theories underline the fact that abstract concepts are grounded in specific contents, as situations, introspective states, emotions. These approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive, since it is possible that they can account for different subsets of abstract concepts and words. One novel and fruitful way to understand the way in which abstract concepts are represented is to analyze how sign languages encode concepts into signs. In the present paper we will discuss these theoretical issues mostly relying on examples taken from Italian Sign Language (LIS, Lingua dei Segni Italiana), the visual-gestural language used within the Italian Deaf community. We will verify whether and to what extent LIS signs provide evidence favoring the different theories of abstract concepts. In analyzing signs we will distinguish between direct forms of involvement of the body and forms in which concepts are grounded differently, for example relying on linguistic experience. In dealing with the LIS evidence, we will consider the possibility that different abstract concepts are represented using different levels of embodiment. The collected evidence will help us to discuss whether a unitary embodied theory of abstract concepts is possible or whether the different theoretical proposals can account for different aspects of their representation.