Abstract
This investigation describes how the deaf express manual communication in actual conditions on the purpose to examine the relations among manual expressive movements, language background and language proficiency. The subjects consisted of 22 deaf high school students. Results indicated that the subjects who have deaf parents had many grammatical expressions in Japanese Sign Language, but subjects who have all hearing families and subjects who have a deaf family except their mother had only a few grammatical expressions in JSL. On the contrary, subjects who have deaf parents had only a few grammatical expressions in the Manual Code Japanese, but the others had lots of grammatical expressions of it. Subjects who have deaf parents and daily use sign language got high scores on Japanese language proficiency test, but many of the others got low scores. The amount of fingerspelling mistaken in Manual Code Japanese had an important relevance to proficiency in language of each subject. Overall, we show that there were significant relations between manual expressive movements and language background, and the relations had great influence on language proficiency of the deaf.
