About

Jenny Singleton is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Stony Brook University. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989. Her research focuses on sign language acquisition, language socialization, and sign language disorders. As a faculty member, she contributes to the understanding of how sign languages are learned and socialized, and she is involved in related research and teaching within the department.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Linguistics
• Sociology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Communication
• Cognitive psychology
• Medicine
• Psychiatry
• Clinical psychology
• Mathematics
• Mathematical analysis
• Developmental psychology
• Mathematics education
• History
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• A Case Study of a Deaf Autistic Adolescent’s Affective and Linguistic Expressions

  Behavioral Sciences · 2025-10-22

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Facial expressions and body language play crucial roles in communication by conveying emotional and contextual information. In signed languages, facial expressions also serve linguistic functions. While previous research on autistic individuals' facial expressions has focused primarily on affective expressions in hearing people, studying deaf autistic individuals offers insight into how autism affects linguistic and affective facial expressions. This case study examines the nonmanual expressions of "Brent," a Deaf autistic adolescent natively exposed to American Sign Language (ASL). Five video recordings (four monologues and one conversation, totaling 35 m) were coded for nonmanual expressions, including affective facial expressions, question marking, negation, and other functions. Across 590 coded utterances, Brent showed absent or reduced facial expressions for both linguistic and affective purposes. However, he frequently used alternative communicative strategies, including additional manual signs, sign modification, and body enactment. Use of body movement to convey negation, affirmation, or emphasis was observed but inconsistently applied. These findings expand the current understanding of how autistic individuals use facial expressions by including linguistic functions in a signed language and support a broader view of autistic communication that embraces diverse and effective languaging strategies beyond neurotypical norms.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Everyday challenges and solutions for individuals aging with deafness

  Innovation in Aging · 2025-06-30

  articleOpen access

  Background and Objectives: . Research Design and Methods: We used a community-engaged research approach to understand everyday challenges and solutions of 60 older ASL users who self-identified as Deaf. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in ASL to probe challenges and responses to those challenges across six everyday activity categories: Activities Within the Home; Activities Outside the home; Transportation; Managing Health; Shopping and Finances; and Basic Daily Activities. Results: Older Deaf adults shared their lived experiences and reported challenges with unreliable technology, communication, and accessibility in the context of engaging in a myriad of everyday activities. For instance, they reported that technology alerts (e.g., airport announcements) are typically auditory, and healthcare accessibility is poor due to a lack of ASL interpreters. When probed about their solutions to these everyday challenges, participants reported relying on hearing family members, using their own methods, such as self-advocating, and using devices/technologies. Discussion and Implications: Everyday challenges experienced by older Deaf adults may be mitigated by improving the reliability and accessibility of technologies used by this population, as well as improving communication accessibility across various public and private settings. Including older Deaf community members in the needs assessment and design process is critical for development of technology solutions to improve engagement in everyday activities.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Utility of the R-ABC in Assessing Risk for Autism Compared With the M-CHAT: An Exploratory Study

  Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities · 2024-02-26

  article

  Over the past 20+ years, researchers have worked toward identifying early behavioral predictors of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and developing observation-based screeners to supplement existing parent-report methods. This study is a follow-up, 3 to 8 years later, with parents/caregivers of 57 children previously enrolled in a U.S. university-based study evaluating early ASD-risk. The original study evaluated infants’ (ages 15–35 months) ASD-risk through both observation-based and parent-report screeners. At follow-up, caregivers completed a phone interview inquiring about their child’s developmental progress and diagnostic outcomes. Results indicated screener at-risk status agreement in infancy predicted only one of the four parent-reported ASD diagnoses at follow-up. Single instrument at-risk status aligned with two additional ASD diagnoses (one per screener), and both screeners missed one ASD diagnosis at follow-up. Results did not indicate significant added utility for the observation-based screener over the commonly used parent-report screener, suggesting that ASD behavioral markers may be hard to observe at early ages.

  PublisherDOI

• Disability does not negatively impact linguistic visual-spatial processing for hearing adult learners of a signed language

  Frontiers in Communication · 2023-05-30 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  The majority of adult learners of a signed language are hearing and have little to no experience with a signed language. Thus, they must simultaneously learn a specific language and how to communicate within the visual-gestural modality. Past studies have examined modality-unique drivers of acquisition within first and second signed language learners. In the former group, atypically developing signers have provided a unique axis—namely, disability—for analyzing the intersection of language, modality, and cognition. Here, we extend the question of how cognitive disabilities affect signed language acquisition to a novel audience: hearing, second language (L2) learners of a signed language. We ask whether disability status influences the processing of spatial scenes (perspective taking) and short sentences (phonological contrasts), two aspects of the learning of a signed language. For the methodology, we conducted a secondary, exploratory analysis of a data set including college-level American Sign Language (ASL) students. Participants completed an ASL phonological- discrimination task as well as non-linguistic and linguistic (ASL) versions of a perspective-taking task. Accuracy and response time measures for the tests were compared between a disability group with self-reported diagnoses (e.g., ADHD, learning disability) and a neurotypical group with no self-reported diagnoses. The results revealed that the disability group collectively had lower accuracy compared to the neurotypical group only on the non-linguistic perspective-taking task. Moreover, the group of students who specifically identified as having a learning disability performed worse than students who self-reported using other categories of disabilities affecting cognition. We interpret these findings as demonstrating, crucially, that the signed modality itself does not generally disadvantage disabled and/or neurodiverse learners, even those who may exhibit challenges in visuospatial processing. We recommend that signed language instructors specifically support and monitor students labeled with learning disabilities to ensure development of visual-spatial skills and processing in signed language.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A case study of the American Sign Language patterns of a natively-exposed Deaf autistic signer

  Language Acquisition · 2023-12-19 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Research on the acquisition of American Sign Language (ASL) by deaf autistic children has documented similarities to the linguistic profile of hearing children on the autism spectrum and has identified sign-specific phenomena that could serve as clinical markers of autism in the deaf population. However, the acquisition of a signed language by deaf autistic individuals whose language use appears to be at age-level is not well documented. Here we present a case study of ASL use by a Deaf autistic adolescent exposed to ASL since birth. Data include two video recordings (collected at age 16;11 and 17;4 years) of his spontaneous ASL. Utterances were coded for repetitions, phonological form, fingerspelling, metalinguistic awareness, and facial expressions having grammatical functions. Other data include a writing sample (17;6) and background information obtained from parental interviews and formal psycho-educational evaluations (between ages 14 and 17). Results revealed this adolescent has strong ASL skills including sophisticated vocabulary and semantic content, advanced fingerspelling, and evidence of metalinguistic awareness. His distinctive signing patterns include abundant repetition of phrases, intrusion of non-ASL handshapes, articulation disfluency, reduced facial expressiveness, and a dissociation between fingerspelling and writing skills. The results of this study diversify and broaden discussions of the ways that autism may interact with language development, especially in the visual-gestural modality. Understanding language patterns in autistic signers more fully will improve identification of autism in the deaf population, promote acceptance of diverse signing patterns in the Deaf community, and lead to better support for this population.

  PublisherDOI

• Sign language socialization and participant frameworks in three indigenous Mesoamerican communities

  Research on Children and Social Interaction · 2023-12-21 · 9 citations

  articleSenior author

  This article provides a cross-cultural study of language socialization through sign language in three indigenous Mesoamerican communities. We explore whether child signers are socialized to use visual communicative practices as participants or observers. We present four conversations that illustrate how child signers are socialized into these practices. Child signers in our study acquire appropriate visual practices, even when they are primarily observers. But sign language socialization practices may be distinct from broader patterns of spoken language socialization in terms of participant frameworks. We find that recognition of child signers as full participants in sign conversation is shaped by a constellation of local child-rearing beliefs and language ecology dynamics.

  PublisherDOI

• UNDERSTANDING CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS FOR DEAF OLDER ADULTS

  Innovation in Aging · 2023-12-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract The Aging Concerns, Challenges, and Everyday Solution Strategies (ACCESS) project explores everyday activity challenges and solutions experienced by U.S. older adults as they age with a lifelong disability involving vision, motor, or hearing. Here, we report our findings from our community-engaged research with older adults who self-identify as members of the U.S. Deaf Community and who use American Sign Language (ASL) as their primary language. Using trained Deaf interviewers, we conducted semi-structured interviews in ASL with 60 Deaf participants (age 60-79 years) to understand their challenges performing various everyday activities (e.g., doing things around the home, activities outside the home, transportation, and managing health). Overall, our thematic analyses revealed that Deaf older adults navigate everyday tasks quite well. However, they experience particular challenges with technology, communication, and accessibility; specifically, fragile or inaccessible technology systems. For instance, technology alerting systems at home (e.g., smoke alarms) or airports (e.g., gate change announcements) are typically auditory. Accessibility is also poor when healthcare or wellness providers fail to provide an ASL interpreter. When probed about their responses to these challenges, Deaf older adults often reported frustration or resignation when experiencing barriers; the need for constant vigilance and self-advocacy; or reliance on hearing family members when systems fail them. Improving communication access and technologies that Deaf older adults rely on is critical and requires the inclusion of individuals from the Deaf community to identify the challenges and potential avenues for solutions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The socialization of modality capital in sign language ecologies: A classroom example

  Frontiers in Psychology · 2022-10-28 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Gaze behavior is an important component of children’s language, cognitive, and sociocultural development. This is especially true for young deaf children acquiring a signed language—if they are not looking at the language model, they are not getting linguistic input. Deaf caregivers engage their deaf infants and toddlers using visual and tactile strategies to draw in, support, and promote their child’s visual attention; we argue that these caregiver actions create a developmental niche that establishes the visual modality capital their child needs for successful sign language learning. But most deaf children do not have deaf signing parents (reportedly over 90%) and they will need to rely on adult signing teachers if they are to acquire a signed language at an early age. This study examines classroom interactions between a Deaf teacher, her teacher’s aide, and six deaf preschoolers to document the teachers’ “everyday practices” as they socialize the gaze behavior of these children. Utilizing a detailed behavioral and linguistic analysis of two video-recorded book-sharing contexts, we present data summarizing the teacher’s attention-getting actions directed toward the children and the discourse-embedded cues that signal the teacher’s expectations for student participation in the signed conversation. We observed that the teacher’s behaviors differed according to the parent status of the deaf preschooler (Deaf parents vs. hearing parents) suggesting that Deaf children of Deaf parents arrive to the preschool classroom with well-developed self-regulation of their attention or gaze. The teachers also used more physical and explicit cueing with the deaf children of hearing parents—possibly to promote their ability to leverage the visual modality for sign language acquisition. We situate these socialization patterns within a framework that integrates notions of intuitive or indigenous practices, developmental niche, and modality capital. Implications for early childhood deaf education are also discussed.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Acquisition of turn-taking in sign language conversations: An overview of language modality and turn structure

  Frontiers in Psychology · 2022 · 11 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Sociology
  • Psychology

  The task of transitioning from one interlocutor to another in conversation - taking turns - is a complex social process, but typically transpires rapidly and without incident in conversations between adults. Cross-linguistic similarities in turn timing and turn structure have led researchers to suggest that it is a core antecedent to human language and a primary driver of an innate "interaction engine." This review focuses on studies that have tested the extent of turn timing and turn structure patterns in two areas: across language modalities and in early language development. Taken together, these two lines of research offer predictions about the development of turn-taking for children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) acquiring sign languages. We introduce considerations unique to signed language development - namely the heterogenous ecologies in which signed language acquisition occurs, suggesting that more work is needed to account for the diverse circumstances of language acquisition for DHH children. We discuss differences between early sign language acquisition at home compared to later sign language acquisition at school in classroom settings, particularly in countries with national sign languages. We also compare acquisition in these settings to communities without a national sign language where DHH children acquire local sign languages. In particular, we encourage more documentation of naturalistic conversations between DHH children who sign and their caregivers, teachers, and peers. Further, we suggest that future studies should consider: visual/manual cues to turn-taking and whether they are the same or different for child or adult learners; the protracted time-course of turn-taking development in childhood, in spite of the presence of turn-taking abilities early in development; and the unique demands of language development in multi-party conversations that happen in settings like classrooms for older children versus language development at home in dyadic interactions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Sign Language Acquisition in Context

  Routledge eBooks · 2021 · 13 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Computer Science

  For many deaf children, acquiring a signed language occurs outside the home, in a school setting, and not from their parents. Often deaf children are not exposed to a signed language at all during the critical early years. While some family contexts support a deaf child creating their own form of signed communication – so-called homesign, for other families the child’s exposure to a signed language does not happen until later childhood, or even adolescence, or perhaps not at all. This creates unique primary language-learning environments that inform language science about the language-making capacity (or resilience) of the child as well as the quality and frequency of the linguistic input needed for acquisition. This chapter discusses signed language acquisition across language socialization contexts that vary in whether native signers, nonnative signers, peers, and teachers are language models. Delayed, inconsistent, or imperfect language input has implications for language outcomes. Case studies of deaf children demonstrate how they can draw from both internal and external resources when faced with imperfect language input. We close with a discussion of how early childhood classrooms with deaf children can foster language acquisition in a manner that is more consistent with primary, or family-based, language acquisition.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Doctoral Dissertation Research: Word Learning in a Signed Language and Its Relationship to Spoken Word Learning in Hearing Non-Signing Adults

  NSF · $19k · 2017–2019

Frequent coauthors

• David Quinto‐Pozos

  The University of Texas at Austin

  15 shared

• David Martinez

  University of Maryland, College Park

  14 shared

• Peter C. Hauser

  Rochester Institute of Technology

  9 shared

• Wendy A. Rogers

  9 shared

• Tracy L. Mitzner

  7 shared

• Anjali J. Forber‐Pratt

  4 shared

• Susan Goldin‐Meadow

  3 shared

• Elena T. Gonzalez

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  3 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  1989