The video menu at Dialogue Cafe teaches hearing people how to order a drink using sign language. The video menu at Dialogue Cafe teaches hearing people how to order a drink using sign language. 'Coffee is just the excuse': the deaf-run cafe where hearing people sign to order W esley Hartwell raised his fists to the barista and shook them next to his ears. He then lowered his fists, extended his thumbs and little fingers, and moved them up and down by his chest, as though milking a cow. Finally, he laid the fingers of one hand flat on his chin and flexed his wrist forward.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is poised to vote on a controversial proposal that could reshape education for thousands of deaf and hard-of-hearing students, a key battle in a long national fight over how such children learn language. Oscar winner Marlee Matlin and the American Civil Liberties Union are among those urging the Board of Education to pass Resolution 029-21/22 at its meeting Tuesday, inaugurating a new Department of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Education. Students would be eligible to receive the state seal of biliteracy on their diplomas, and ASL would be offered as a language course in some high schools. The resolution also would introduce ASL-English bilingual instruction for many of the district's youngest deaf learners -- a move supporters say is critical to language equity and opponents say robs parents of choice and runs afoul of federal education law. "For 400 years at least there's been a big battle between people who think children with hearing loss should speak, and people who think they should use sign language -- it's a very old argument," said Alison M. Grimes, director of audiology and newborn hearing at UCLA Health.

Films and TV programmes have long portrayed caveman as using grunts to communicate with one another. But a new study suggests that our ancient ancestors likely did not use sounds to communicate, and instead opted for hand gestures. Researchers from the University of Western Australia asked volunteers to attempt to describe words using only grunts or gestures. They found that gestures were far more effective in communicating meaning and were often similar between cultures. 'The universality of gesture means it is ideally suited to bootstrapping human communication among modern humans and therefore supports the hypothesis that gesture is the primary modality for language creation,' the researchers said in their study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Films and TV programmes have long portrayed caveman as using grunts to communicate with one another. Searching for a way to make your point?

Can you imagine a mind without language? More specifically, can you imagine your mind without language? Can you think, plan, or relate to other people if you lack words to help structure your experiences? Many great thinkers have drawn a strong connection between language and the mind. Oscar Wilde called language "the parent, and not the child, of thought"; Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world"; and Bertrand Russell stated that the role of language is "to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it."

LODE is a web tool for children that are novice readers, and is primarily meant for deaf children. It proposes written stories and interactive games for reasoning, globally, on the stories. In this paper, first, we motivate the rationale of LODE, and explain its reasoning games. Then we briefly describe the design of the web client-server architecture of LODE; the server employs a constraint programming system for creating and solving the LODE games in real time. Finally, we concentrate on two evaluations of the latest prototype of LODE: one with hearing novice readers; another one with deaf readers. We conclude by discussing the results of the evaluations, and their implications for LODE.