1. Emmorey, Karen, Robin Thompson, and Rachael Colvin. 2009. Eye Gaze During Comprehension of American Sign Language by Native and Beginning Signers. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 14 (2): 237-243.

2.  Deaf people are natural story tellers  ASL story: http://youtu.be/WI_XRyJorKE

3.  Where do viewers of American Sign Language focus their attention?  Do beginning signers focus their attention differently than advanced signers?

4.  Just as eye tracking can be used in reading to detect comprehension difficulties, "patterns of gaze perception and movement might provide a measure of processing difficulty for sign language comprehension."  In live signing interactions, "addressees would be less likely to fixate on the upper body of the signer and more likely to fixate on the signer's eyes."  "Beginning signers who are hearing will spend less time fixating on the face, will fixate on the lower part of the face or the upper body of the signer, and will also shift fixation to the hands more frequently than native deaf signers."

5.  Staub and Rainer (2007): reading comprehension difficulties can be tracked based on the location of the reader's eyes  Baker and Padden (1978); Siple (1978): Generally speaking, signers keep their gaze focused on other signers when communicating with them  Muir and Richardson (2005): eye tracking patters of Deaf users of BSL found that 61- 99% of the time, the participants were focused on the face of the signer  Proksch and Bavalier (2002): lack of auditory abilities increases peripheral vision detection and attention

6.  Nine native Deaf ASL signers  4 male, 5 female  Mean age 25.9  Ten hearing beginning signers  2 male, 8 female  Mean age 20.4

7.  Head mounted eye tracker  Two narratives presented by one of five native signers  Story about children painting each other when their mom wasn't paying attention  Description of spatial layout of a town  For the story, participants were asked five comprehension questions  For the town, participants were asked to draw a map of the town's landmarks  Percentage of time each participant fixated on or near face of the signer was calculated

11.  Almost 99% of the time when the perceivers looked away from the face, the signer was looking at their hands  Non-native signers did NOT spend more time looking away from the face than native signers  Native signers prefer to make eye contact in face-to-face communication  This conveys grammatical information and allows them to fixate in one spot instead of following the signer's hands