THISARTICLE GIVES AN OVERVIEW of past and present library services to, and policies about, deaf people. The unique properties of the deaf community are discussed. Recent developments in deaf studies, library services for deaf people, and laws affecting library services to deaf people are discussed. The roles librarians and libraries can play in providing library services to, and developing poli...

Most deaf children and adults struggle to read, but some deaf individuals do become highly proficient readers. There is disagreement about the specific causes of reading difficulty in the deaf population, and consequently, disagreement about the effectiveness of different strategies for teaching reading to deaf children. Much of the disagreement surrounds the question of whether deaf children r...

This ethnographic study explores the identity development of 9 deaf participants through the narratives of their educational experiences in either mainstream or special schools for the Deaf. This exploration goes beyond a binary conceptualization of deaf identity that allows for only the medical and social models and proposes a bicultural "dialogue model." This postmodern theoretical framework ...

OBJECTIVE North American studies conclude that deaf children may have a 2-3 times greater risk of sexual abuse than hearing children. No comparative studies are available in the Nordic countries. The present study was initiated to estimate the prevalence of childhood sexual abuse among deaf children in Norway, describe the nature of the abuse, and to examine risk factors. METHOD A self-admini...

This study looks to obtain a better understanding of the issues surrounding the Black Deaf community by examining the cultural and sociolinguistic features that differentiate it from the larger Deaf community. In the present study, three deaf black participants were asked a series of questions about their experiences within the Black Deaf community as well as their observations concerning Black...

Deaf Liberation Theology is a branch of theology that has been developed over the past twenty years, with the book Deaf Liberation Theology published by Ashgate in 2007 (Lewis 2007) as a focal point of this development. This article briefly looks at the roots of Deaf Liberation Theology in both the concept of Deaf people as an oppressed linguistic minority and the principles of Liberation theol...

This study examined differences between deaf and hearing students' perceptions of their social emotional adjustment as they transition to college. The 16PF-Adolescent Personality Questionnaire Life Difficulties Scale was completed by 205 deaf students and 185 hearing students. A multivariate analyses of variance and subsequent univariate tests found that deaf students rated themselves as experi...

Should ethnicity be used to interpret relations between the Deaf community and the hearing people? Recent scholarship questioning the merits of Deaf ethnicity suggests a need to reexamine the use of ethnicity when describing Deaf identity and culture. This article provides an overview of key contributions to race and ethnicity discourse in the 20th century, identifies epistemological and ontolo...

This article presents a study that examined the impact of visual communication on the quality of the early interaction between deaf and hearing mothers and fathers and their deaf children aged between 18 and 24 months. Three communication mode groups of parent-deaf child dyads that differed by the use of signing and visual-tactile communication strategies were involved: (a) hearing parents comm...

While many children who are born severely or profoundly deaf, or become deaf in infancy achieve intelligible speech, the vast majority do not. Speech intelligibility is fairly well correlated with residual hearing (Boothroyd, 1970; Smith, 1972) at least until 90dB, and overall intelligibility is well correlated with the percent of segmental errors, and to a lesser extent with suprasegmental dev...