For over 25 years in some countries and more recently in others, bilingual education involving sign language and the written/spoken vernacular has been considered an essential educational intervention for deaf children. With the recent growth in universal newborn hearing screening and technological advances such as digital hearing aids and cochlear implants, however, more deaf children than eve...

Deaf children who receive a cochlear implant early in life and engage in intensive oral/aural therapy often make great strides in spoken language acquisition. However, despite clinicians' best efforts, there is a great deal of variability in language outcomes. One concern is that cortical regions which normally support auditory processing may become reorganized for visual function, leaving fewe...

We adapted the semantic fluency task into British Sign Language (BSL). In Study 1, we present data from twenty-two deaf signers aged four to fifteen. We show that the same 'cognitive signatures' that characterize this task in spoken languages are also present in deaf children, for example, the semantic clustering of responses. In Study 2, we present data from thirteen deaf children with Specifi...

BACKGROUND Deafness is the hidden disability of childhood, and leads to poor educational and employment prospects. There is little published information on deafness in Pakistan. Profound hearing impairment is more prevalent in countries where consanguineous marriages are common, such as Pakistan. This study aimed to assess causes of childhood deafness and association with parental consanguinity...

The lack of educational tools for/in Sign Language (SL) is one of the most challenging issues faced by the Deaf communities in Brazil – it causes language barriers (e.g. prejudice, late acquisition, lack of standards etc.). This deficit is detrimental to the development of the Deaf culture (a social movement that regards deafness as a difference in Human experience). 90% of Deaf children are bo...

PURPOSE The authors investigated the ability of deaf children with cochlear implants (CIs) to use sentence context to facilitate the perception of spoken words. METHOD Deaf children with CIs (n = 24) and an age-matched group of children with normal hearing (n = 31) were presented with lexically controlled sentences and were asked to repeat each sentence in its entirety. Performance was analyz...

There is no evidence that learning a natural human language is cognitively harmful to children. To the contrary, multilingualism has been argued to be beneficial to all. Nevertheless, many professionals advise the parents of deaf children that their children should not learn a sign language during their early years, despite strong evidence across many research disciplines that sign languages ar...

Explanations of cognitive functioning in the deaf have been marred by the use of inappropriate measurement instruments, comparisons based' on the average performance of deaf and hearing subjer.s, and failure to consider developmental changes across age levels. In the present study the Snijders-Oomen Nonverbal Intelligence Test (SON) was adminis.ered to 251 deaf children and 101 hearing children...

126 Copyright © 1999 American Psychological Society VOL. 10, NO. 2, MARCH 1999 Abstract—The purpose of the study reported here was to examine the degree to which delays or deficits in developing a theory of mind are specific to children with autism or extend to other groups of atypical children with varying conversational experience and awareness. The performance of deaf children from a variety...

Failing to acquire language in early childhood because of language deprivation is a rare and exceptional event, except in one population. Deaf children who grow up without access to indirect language through listening, speech-reading, or sign language experience language deprivation. Studies of Deaf adults have revealed that late acquisition of sign language is associated with lasting deficits....