Are Deaf people naturally optimistic? How much do Deaf people think they can influence stressful situations in their lives? There's a major study into the attitudes of BSL users and the researchers need as many Deaf people as possible to fill in an online questionnaire that is available in BSL. The study is being run jointly by the Social Research with Deaf people group at the University of Manchester, and the Deafness, Cognition and Language research centre, and the London Psychometric Laboratory at the University of London. You can find out more by going to
And, if you're the sort of person who's fascinated by our Stories Behind the Signs and you're hungry for a deeper knowledge of linguistics, DCAL is going to be running a Linguistic course for 11 weeks on Thursdays from 8th October to 17th December and they're looking for Deaf people to enrol. For course information look at
We're on our annual summer transmission break and will be back on air in September. In the meanwhile, the See Hear team are covering some exciting stories...we're experiencing some Hollywood glamour with Marlee Matlin, who's given See Hear an exclusive interview where she she discusses her life and her work as world's best-known Deaf actor. She brought her interpreter Jack (who's been working with her for 24 years) along to voice her answers, which of course are in ASL. Marlee has four kids and a very busy career so we were delighted to have this opportunity to talk to her in depth, especially about the revelations she made in her recent autobiography.
And some other members of our team managed to get a good helping of mud and sunshine at Glastonbury, where they were filming with a crowd of young Deaf festival-goers and brushing shoulders with Tom Jones and Lily Allen. In case you think they're having too much fun in the line of duty, they would like to point out that they managed to lose the stoppers for their inflatable sleeping mats and were forced to sleep on very bumpy ground...
We're also working on an education special, looking at the difficulties of a family who are trying to work out how to educate their son who is Deaf and autistic, and following the NDCS campaign to improve acoustics in school classrooms. Acoustic design is also at the heart of a story we're filming about restaurants, where we've been finding out that some pared-down canteen-style chain restaurants are too uncomfortably loud for hearing-impaired diners.
Memnos has been working on his Stories Behind the Signs and we have discovered that Radha has definite potential as a biker chick...
Are there other Deaf or Hard of Hearing stories you'd like to see us covering? Please let us know and we'll do our best.
