Publications
ASL Curricula
Zarchy, R.M. & Geer, L.C. (2023). American Sign Language at Home: A Family Curriculum: Second Edition. Solificatio.
Zarchy, R.M. & Geer, L.C. (2020). American Sign Language at Home: A Family Curriculum. BookBaby
Journal Articles
Morgan, E. H., Geer, L.C., & Moylan, J. A. (accepted). Innovative Models of Parent Education and Empowerment for Families of Disabled Children. National Council on Family Relations Family Focus: Parenting Education. Winter 2023.
Geer, L.C. & Zarchy, R.M. (2023). The Importance of Teaching Deaf Community Cultural Wealth in Family-Centered Sign Language Curricula. Diffractions, (2)7; pp. 82-107.
Sanzo, K., Geer, L.C., & Embry, K. (2023). Syntax Intervention in American Sign Language: An Exploratory Case Study. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1093/deafed/enad048
Occhino, C., Lidster, R, Geer, L.C, Listman, J., & Hauser, PC. (2023). Development of the American Sign Language Fingerspelling and Numbers Comprehension Test. Language Testing, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/02655322231179494
Geer, L.C. (2021). Syllabus: Current Issues in Deaf World: Deaf Languages & Cultures Around the Globe. Syllabus, 10(2); pp. 1-14. https://syllabusjournal.org/syllabus/article/view/305
Geer, L.C. & Keane, J. (2018). Improving ASL fingerspelling comprehension in L2 learners with explicit phonetic instruction. 2018. Language Teaching Research. Vol. 22(4) pp. 439-457. DOI: 10.1177/1362168818886988
Witkin, G.A., Morere, D.A., & Geer, L.C. (2013). Establishment of a phonemic clustering system for American Sign Language. Sign Language Studies. Volume 14(1), Fall 2013
Geer, L.C. (2011). Kinship in Mongolian Sign Language. Sign Language Studies. Volume 11(4), Summer 2011, pp. 594-605
Turkish translation by Emre ÇETİNKAYA: Bitig Türkoloji Araştırmaları Dergisi, Güz 2021 / 2: 103-112.
Peer-reviewed monograph
Zarchy, R. M. & Geer, L. C. (2023). A Family-Centered Signed Language Curriculum to Support Deaf Children’s Language Acquisition. In E. Wilkinson & D. Quinto-Pozos (Eds.) Elements in Signed Language Linguistics. Cambridge University Press.
Refereed book chapters
Chua, M., de Meulder, M., Geer, L., Henner, J., Hou, L., Kubus, O., O’Brien, D., & Robinson, O. (2022). 1001 Small Victories: Deaf Academics and Imposter Syndrome. In M. Addison. M. Breeze, & Y. Taylor (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Imposter Syndrome’ in Higher Education. Palgrave
Geer, L.C. (2020). Teaching L2 Fingerspelling Sign Language Fingerspelling. In R. Rosen (Ed.) Handbook of Sign Language Pedagogy, Routledge.
Geer, L.C. & Wilcox, S. (2019). Fingerspelling. In J.S. Damico & M.J. Bell (Eds.) The SAGE Encyclopedia of Human Communication Sciences and Disorders. SAGE Publications. ISBN 1483380823
Conference Proceedings
Geer, L.C. (2021). All in With Google Slides: Virtual Engagement and Formative Assessment in Introductory Sign Language Linguistics. Proceedings from the Linguistics Society of America Symposium on Scholarly Teaching in the age of Covid-19 and Beyond, 6(2), 1-6, https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v6i2.5103
Geer, L.C. & Keane, J. (2014). Exploring factors that contribute to successful fingerspelling comprehension. In Proceedings from Lexicon at Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC `14); 1905-1910. Reykjavík, Iceland, May 2014
Fanghella, J., Geer, L.C., Henner, J., Hochgesang, J., Lillo-Martin, D., Mathur, G., Mirus, G., Pascual Villanueva, P.
(2012). Linking an ID-gloss database of ASL with child language corpora. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Interactions between Corpus and Lexicon at Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC `12); 57-62. Istanbul, Turkey, May 2012
Geer, L.C. (2012). Sources of variation in Mongolian Sign Language. In Proceedings from SALSA XX: Languages and Societies in Contact Lawrence, Aimee, Stout, Tammi and Chatterjee, Anindita (eds). Volume 55, pp. 33-42
Book Reviews
Geer, L.C. (2022). Sign Language Acquisition by Deaf and Hearing Children, Deborah Chen Pichler, Marlon Kuntze, Diane Lillo-Martin, Ronice Müller de Quadros, and Marianne Rossi Stumpf. Sign Language & Linguistics. Volume 25, Number 1, 2022, pp. 92-98.
Geer, L.C. (2013). Book review of Formational Units in Sign Languages, Rachel Channon & Harry van der Hulst (eds). Sign Language & Linguistics. Volume 15, Number 2, 2013, pp. 271-276.
Bulletin articles
Geer, L.C. (2020). Language First Bulletin (2020). ASL Phonology. (Issue 2, Fall 2020)
Geer, L.C. (2020). Language First Bulletin (2020). Development of Handshape in Children Acquiring Sign Languages. Agency. (Issue 1, Spring 2020)
Extended Abstracts
Geer, L. C. (2017). Teaching ASL fingerspelling to second-language learners: Explicit versus implicit phonetic
training. In Sign Language & Linguistics, 19(2), pp. 280-284. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/sll.19.2.07gee
Henner, J., Geer, L.C., & Lillo-Martin, D. (2013). Calculating Frequency of Occurrence of ASL Handshapes In LSA 2013 Annual Meeting Extended Abstracts, pp. 1-4
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Dissertation
(The University of Texas at Austin, 2016)
This dissertation explores the use of explicit phonetic instruction to students acquiring a second language (L2) in a new modality. Studies of spoken language L2 teaching have shown that learners can be trained to attend to phonetic cues in their new language and that explicit training is the most effective means by which to achieve this. Second-language learners of American Sign Language (ASL) struggle with fingerspelling comprehension more than many other aspects of language-learning; previous work has suggested that part of this challenge is due to the inability to observe and make use of phonetic cues present in the fingerspelling stream. The goal of this dissertation is to determine whether explicit training can benefit ASL learners for fingerspelling comprehension tasks.
Two studies assessed an explicit phonetic training program for ASL learners. An implicit fingerspelling training based on a popular ASL curriculum was also developed and used as a control with which to compare the effect of the explicit training. Designed based on a combination of interactions with L2 students in the classroom, descriptions of coarticulatory features in fingerspelling production, and studies of cues L2 students use to comprehend fingerspelling, the explicit training consisted of two main portions. The first detailed the properties of hold versus transition segments in fingerspelling; the second focused on phonetic variation in fingerspelling production.
The first study involved 18 third-semester ASL students in a five-week summer session. The second involved 80 students taking ASL III in a 15-week fall semester. In both studies, students were divided into two balanced groups based on grades earned in their previous ASL course. One group received the explicit training and the other, the implicit fingerspelling training. Pre- and post-tests involved a fingerspelling comprehension task with two experimental conditions and a control condition. In one condition, periods in which signers hold a letter posture were masked (transitions-only), and in the other condition, periods of transition from posture to posture were masked (holds-only).
Results from the first study revealed a strong effect of the explicit training across experimental conditions, though participants struggle most with the transitions-only condition. Results from the second study revealed a weaker overall effect of the explicit training, but a stronger interaction with the transitions-only condition, which the explicit training helped to address specifically. Taken together, results from both experiments reveal that explicit instruction is more effective in improving students’ fingerspelling comprehension scores. These effects are not ephemeral. With only one exposure to the training program, which lasts approximately 30 minutes, higher scores persist three and six weeks post training.