Abstract
This article is concerned with early childhood deafness and its consequences on communicative, linguistic, and cognitive abilities. This article focuses on the linguistic abilities that deaf children are able to express not only in spoken languages, but in sign languages as well, and highlights some relevant aspects to be taken into account by all researchers and professional working with and for deaf children. The children's cognitive skills need to be evaluated, with appropriate nonverbal tasks. Language assessment must clearly involve an exploration of both expressive and receptive skills and cannot be limited to the spoken modality; rather, it should be extended to the signed modality of language use. Family, language, and educational environments must be taken into account when exploring and assessing deaf children's development. Some relevant findings from a research project conducted by our laboratory on cognitive and linguistic abilities of Italian deaf preschoolers are reported and discussed.
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