INTRODUCTION Cross-modal plasticity has been extensively studied in deaf adults with neuroimaging studies, yielding valuable results. A recent study in our laboratory with deaf-blind children found evidence of cross-modal plasticity, revealed in over-representation of median nerve somatosensory evoked potentials (SEP N20) in left hemisphere parietal, temporal and occipital regions. This finding...

84 deaf students (from primary school to college) and their families participated in this inclusion project in cooperation with numerous institutions in northern Italy (Brescia-Lombardy). Participants were either congenitally deaf or their deafness was related to other pathologies. This research promoted the integration of deaf students as they pass from primary school to high school to college...

This study aimed to examine motor performance in deaf elementary school children and its association with sports participation. The population studied included 42 deaf children whose hearing loss ranged from 80 to 120 dB. Their motor skills were assessed with the Movement Assessment Battery for Children, and a questionnaire was used to determine their active involvement in organized sports. The...

The manual gestures that hearing children produce when explaining their answers to math problems predict whether they will profit from instruction in those problems. We ask here whether gesture plays a similar role in deaf children, whose primary communication system is in the manual modality. Forty ASL-signing deaf children explained their solutions to math problems and were then given instruc...

Parasnis is an associate professor in the department of Applied Language and Cognition Research at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY. Her primary research interests are in visual cognition, bilingualismbiculturalism, and deaf education. The perspective that deaf people' should be regarded primarily as a cultural and language minority...

A written single word spelling to dictation test and a single word reading test were given to 68 severe-profoundly oral deaf 10-11-year-old children and 20 hearing children with a diagnosis of dyslexia. The literacy scores of the deaf children and the hearing children with dyslexia were lower than expected for children of their age and did not differ from each other. Three quarters of the spell...

The recent controversy surrounding the choice, by a deaf lesbian couple, to have children who were themselves deaf, has focused attention on the ethics of choosing (apparent) disabilities for children. Deaf activists argue that deafness is not a disability, but instead the constitutive condition of access to a rich culture. Being deaf carries disadvantages with it, but these are a product of di...

The current study addressed deaf children’s Theory of Mind (ToM) development as measured by a battery of firstand second-order belief tasks. Both a chronological agematched control group and a younger group of pre-school aged hearing children were compared to a group of deaf children born to hearing parents. A hearing native signer enacted each of the tasks, which were pre-recorded in video cli...

This chapter describes a study of literacy learning in Deaf children who acquire American Sign Language (ASL) as a first language and learn to read and write English as a second language.1 Literacy can be defined beyond the basic tasks of reading and writing to include the strong connection between language learning and the individual’s thinking, identity, and community. This framework emphasiz...

OVERVIEW Intellectual assessment of children who are deaf or hard of hearing presents unique challenges to the clinician charged with attempting to obtain an accurate representation of the child's skills. Selection of appropriate intellectual assessment instruments requires a working knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of the measure and what changes in standardized administration might b...