Studying Sign Language Disorders: Considering Neuropsychological Data

This chapter provides a clinical neuropsychological assessment approach for assisting with the identification of language disorders in signers. The areas covered include documenting the signers' history and background and testing their general cognitive ability, receptive and expressive language skills. It also include facial processing abilities, vision, visual spatial processing, motor skills of the hands and fingers, executive functioning, visual learning and memory, and social-emotional functioning. The assessment of these domains helps one to rule out a primary language disorder when the language symptoms may be secondary to a different primary disorder. This assessment approach aids the researcher in determining the possible contributing cognitive factors and in describing the symptomology. The chapter examines how to assess developmental language disorders in children, the same neuropsychological assessment approach can be used with adults who may have experienced a disruption to language functioning secondary to a stroke, a tumor, dementia, or a head injury.