‏‫פרויקט מחקר שפת הסימנים ולקויות בשפת הסימנים

SIGN-HUB is a 4-year research project (2016-2020) funded by the European Commission within Horizon 2020 Reflective Society 2015, Research and Innovation actions. It has been designed by a European research team to provide an innovative and inclusive resource hub for the linguistic, historical and cultural documentation of the Deaf communities’ heritage and for sign language assessment in clinical intervention and school settings.

Aims of the Israeli team

Development of tools for sign language assessment

The peculiar conditions under which sign languages are often acquired, namely, the lack of a native deaf signer model during the sensitive period of language acquisition, pose special challenges to the diagnosis of linguistic deficits in special populations, e.g., children with Specific Language Impairment, people with aphasia and elderly people for whom the effect of aging is not always easy to disentangle from very early stages of neurodegenerative diseases. We aim at building reliable tests to diagnose language pathology and to facilitate intervention with special populations of signers. The outcome of SIGN-HUB will be useful also with respect to the population of signing children with a cochlear implant. In this very special case of bilingualism, it is important to have reliable assessment tools in both the spoken and the sign language used by the child; yet, at the moment, such tests are available only for the spoken language involved. The interface implementation will allow administering the tests both on computers and mobile devices (e.g. tablets). For repletion tasks, an automatic system of evaluation will be developed.



Creation of a digital archive of elderly signers’ linguistic and cultural heritage
An important part of SIGN-HUB is documenting and preserving part of the European linguistic and cultural heritage by creating, analyzing and making available a digital archive of life narratives of elderly signers about their individual and collective memories in different European Deaf communities. This archive will constitute an unprecedented stepping stone towards the documentation of the history of Deaf communities since the mid-20th century and the language change attested from that generation on. The project will systematically record, document, subtitle, analyze, make available online and thus preserve and disseminate the linguistic uses as well as the cultural heritage and historical memories of elderly deaf people in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Turkey (in France and Israel SIGN-HUB will digitalize and/or extend existing archives of deaf signers that are at the risk of loss). The project guarantees systematic data collection, the digital archiving of videos, subtitling, professional annotation, and scientific study of the life stories of elderly signers. we will also support the production of documentary movies collecting the most salient parts of the interviews with elderly signers, to report aspects of the life of minorities and disabled people in the European past. These documentary movies will center around different topics, including: (i) the life in the Institute for the Deaf across Europe; (ii) the impact of World War 2, Shoah, Civil War, or Cold War on the Deaf community; (iii) the situation of women inside the Deaf community; (iv) the situation of signers from minorities (ethnic, gay/lesbian); (v) the first encounter with a deaf person from another (European) country.