Development Of Deaf Children Research Articles

Literacy and the role of parents of deaf children

This study focuses on the involvement of parents in the reading development of their deaf children and gathers evidence on parental experiences of reading with their child at home. Of particular interest is the relationship between teachers and parents working as partners in establishing a literacy environment for deaf children. It is concluded that uncertainty in professional practice about methods of developing literacy in deaf children could be one of the reasons why confident support is not always offered to parents. Questionnaire data suggest that only a minority of parents in the study received advice from teachers on reading interaction strategies or on appropriate materials for home reading with their children. Although most of the parents in the study enjoyed reading with their children at home, there remained a large group of parents who expressed concern over obstacles encountered in the reading process and who were unclear about the most effective way to enable their deaf child to become literate. These problems are in fact similar to some of the difficulties experienced by teachers of the deaf during reading sessions. Some deaf children may be doubly disadvantaged by reading environments at home and at school which are less than facilitative. Some implications are drawn for both teacher training and research, for effective parent–teacher partnerships that lead to consistency and joint problem-solving, whilst reference is made to previous studies which have highlighted the need for evidence-based practice in promoting reading development in deaf children.

Neurolinguistic development in deaf children: the effect of early language experience

Recent investigations have indicated a relationship between the development of cerebral lateralization for processing language and the level of development of linguistic skills in hearing children. The research on cerebral lateralization for language processing in deaf persons is compatible with this view. We have argued that the absence of appropriate input during a critical time window creates a risk for deaf children that the initial bias for left-hemisphere specialization will be distorted or disappear. Two experiments were conducted to test this hypothesis. The results of these investigations showed that children educated early and intensively with cued speech or with sign language display more evidence of left-hemisphere specialization for the processing of their native language than do those who have been exposed later and less intensively to those languages.

Cochlear Implants in Children: Ethics and Choices (review)

Cochlear Implants in Children: Ethics and vices by John B. Christia and Irene W. Leigh. (Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2002, 340 pp., casebound, $49.95) LIKE MANY readers of this journal, I have followed the cochlear implant controversy with a cautious and curious stance, not wanting to take sides with any level of passion. As an educator, I would welcome any technological advance that might enhance cognitive and/or linguistic development in deaf children. Months ago, I saw a segment on television about a young deaf girl who received an implant. I watched as she was playing in the yard and heard an airplane flying overhead. The thought that she was made aware of something in the environment and this may have stimulated her thinking about the world around her was quickly lost when the medical doctor and interviewer focused on how long it would be before the young girl would speak like her hearing peers. Wrong focus, I thought. Before advocating the use of such technology on a large-scale basis, I would want to see some research results showing its potential for improving the quality of life. Deaf education has a long history of armchair philosophizing about technology. Closed and open captions, the TTY, and now the Internet, for example, have all been touted in books, magazines, and journals in terms of their potential effects on learning. Yet, there is no great body of research that provides evidence of benefits beyond increased access to information for deaf and hard of hearing people. A glimpse into history also provides some understanding of why there is so much emotion attached to technological advances. Advances in voice telephony led to a ninety-year delay in access to the telephone for deaf people. Advances in adding the sound track to silent movies led to more than forty years of lost access to films. For hundreds of years, deaf people, viewed as disabled, have been treated with chemical and electrical cures, sent up for airplane dives, and subjected to a multitude of other medical fixes. Emotions have long been a part of Deaf education history. The Deaf community has long included many different types of people, and we have experienced technology's impact in different ways. The TTY, for example, eliminated the need for face-to-face communication, saving deaf people long drives to a Deaf club or to the homes of family members and friends just for personal communication. In turn, instant messaging and the Internet may be having an impact on the need for the TTY. Regardless, the TTY would never have come about without collaboration between signing and nonsigning deaf people in the National Association of the Deaf and the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf (through the organization now known as Telecommunications for the Deaf, Inc., or TDI). All the while, American Sign Language (ASL) has become recognized as a true language and is used increasingly by many deaf and hearing people. A number of universities and state education departments recognize ASL as a foreign language. As a deaf person myself, I have deaf friends who have had a range of experiences with cochlear implants. One just received an implant at the age of fifty-six and is delighted with it. So are two friends who are in their thirties. Another received hers fifteen years ago and blames the implant for migraines and frequent nausea. A fourth friend had several implants over the past ten years and does not use an implant now. It only makes me curious. I have wondered also about the range of experiences younger deaf children have with implants. While at a conference at James Madison University last fall I dropped in at the end of a presentation by a cochlear implant expert and was delighted to see him advocating continued use of sign language with implanted children. Yet I also read an article about a school established for implanted children that would not allow the use of sign language. …

The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory: Normative Data for American Sign Language.

To This is a 1 test per thousand learn more about normal language development in deaf children, we have developed the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory for American Sign Language (ASL-CDI), a parent report that measures early sign production. The ASL-CDI is an inventory of sign glosses organized into semantic categories targeted to assess sign language skills in children ages 8 to 36 months. The ASL-CDI uses a recognition format in which parents check off signs that their child produces. The form has demonstrated excellent reliability and validity. To date, normative data have been collected from 69 deaf children with deaf parents who are learning sign language as a first language. We discuss the development of the ASl-CDI and preliminary cross-sectional and longitudinal findings from this early data collection with particular focus on parallels with spoken language acquisition. We also discuss the acquisition of first signs, negation, wh-questions, and fingerspelling with developmental patterns provided based on age, as well as vocabulary size.

Language facility and theory of mind development in deaf children.

Deaf children with signing parents, nonnative signing deaf children, children from a hearing impaired unit (HIU), and oral deaf children were tested on three first-order theory of mind (ToM) tasks--a subset was also given a second-order task (Perner & Wimmer, 1985). A British Sign Language (BSL) receptive language task (Herman, Holmes, & Woll, 1999) and four nonverbal executive function tasks were also administered. The new BSL task allowed, for the first time, the receptive language abilities of deaf children to be measured alongside ToM abilities. Hearing children acted as controls. These children were given the same tasks, except the British Picture Vocabulary Scale was substituted for the BSL task. Language ability correlated positively and significantly with ToM ability, and age was correlated with language ability for both the deaf and hearing children. Age, however, underpinned the relationship between ToM and language for deaf children with signing parents and hearing children but not for nonnative signing, HIU, or oral deaf children. Executive function performance in deaf children was not related to ToM ability. A subset of hearing children, matched on age and language standard scores with signing deaf children, passed significantly more ToM tasks than the deaf children did. The findings are discussed with respect to the hypotheses proposed by Peterson and Siegal (1995, 2000) and Courtin (2000).

Caring for deaf infants: Some useful pointers

Equal access to high quality education is crucial to the development of deaf children in order for them to acquire the knowledge experience and skills to succeed in life. Eight hundred and forty children are born deaf every year in the UK. An additional one million children will experience temporary hearing loss because of glue ear.

Measuring language development in deaf children with cochlear implants.

For the past ten years profoundly deaf children in the UK have been able to receive cochlear implants as an alternative to conventional hearing aids. The South of England Cochlear Implant Centre (SOECIC) has implanted 78 profoundly deaf children. As cochlear implantation is still a relatively new procedure it is important to record progress comprehensively. One of the main aims of implantation is to give the recipient access to sound so that, in the case of a child, they can acquire speech and language. There is a need for a test that assesses a wide range of language abilities and which is also sensitive to change. The Preschool Language Scales-3 (UK) (PLS-3)(Zimmerman et al. 1997) has been standardised on a British population and was chosen to be part of a test battery at SOECIC. The test assesses skills from birth to seven years of age and has been administered at regular intervals to the clinic population. The outcome results show that average scores improve with use following implantation.

Signing and lexical development in children with Down syndrome.

Language development in children with Down syndrome is delayed, on average, relative to general cognitive, motor and social development, and there is also evidence for specific delays in morphology and syntax, with many adults showing persistent problems in these areas. It appears that the combined use of signed and spoken input can boost early language development significantly, this evidence coming initially from single case-studies, and more recently from larger scale controlled studies. Research with typically developing hearing and deaf children, as well as children with Down syndrome, has demonstrated the importance of establishing joint attention for vocabulary development. Furthermore, studies carried out with children with Down syndrome indicate that reducing attentional demands may be especially important in scaffolding language development in this group. The use of signing strategies which have been found to facilitate language development in deaf children when signing to children with Down syndrome is discussed, as is the need for further research on this topic and on the importance of joint attention for the use of other augmentative and alternative communication systems, such as graphic symbol and picture systems.

Review of papers presented at the Round Table session on social and emotional development in deaf children: services in four countries

In the Round Table discussion after the keynote lecture given by anthropologist Laura Lakshmi Fjord, presentations were given by Anna-Lena Tvingstedt, psychologist, PhD and research fellow, Malmö University College, Sweden; by Brita Edlund, Sign Language teacher and chair of the Finnish/Swedish association for parents of deaf children, Finland; by Dusan Kuhar, psychologist and family therapist at the Education center for deaf and hard-of-hearing children in Ljubljana, Slovenia and by Felicity Gifford, teacher of the deaf, State Coordinator of Services to Deaf and Hearing Impaired students, Department of Education, Tasmania, Australia. The focus of the session was set on needs and processes in a family when the diagnosis of a deaf child has just been given. This paper is a summary of the four presentations.

Social interaction and early language development in deaf children

The last decade has witnessed a steady increase in research on interaction between young deaf children and their parents. As a result we are beginning to have a clearer idea of some of the ways in which these interactions differ from those between hearing children and their parents and how such differences may affect deaf children's early language development. In this article I want to reflect upon some of the main findings of the last decade and to speculate about the research issues that will be important in the new millennium.

Principles and practices of literacy development for deaf learners: a historical overview.

Since the very beginning of formal approaches to deaf education, the development of literacy has been a priority issue. The history of educational initiatives in this area is entwined with the history of prevailing attitudes and practices toward the impact of deafness on the development of deaf children more generally. In particular, arguments about whether a visual input (reading) can take the place of a diminished auditory input and whether educators should accommodate or seek to ameliorate the effects of the special linguistic characteristics of deaf learner-readers have resulted in a wide variety of practices and perspectives. These varied practices and perspectives continue to have impacts on current educational debate and practice. This article provides a brief historical overview of these educational endeavors, noting the enduring questions and issues that remain for the field to address.

LANGUAGE, COGNITION, AND DEAFNESS

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.

Preconditions of language development in deaf children

The harmful effects of childhood hearing impairment are given little thought by many people because hearing loss is largely an invisible handicap. An infant with a hearing impairment is generally healthy-looking and develops relatively normally during the first year of life. Hearing impairment in infants interferes with the normal development of spoken language. We are biologically programmed to develop certain skills in response to certain inputs. Language learning is one such skill which must be gained very early in life. Hearing is the most important basis for normal language acquisition and language is the keystone of modern society. Hearing loss must be identified as early as possible in the first years of life, especially a child with profound or severe hearing loss must be identified in the first year of life. If not, the child has missed an irreversible sensitive phase for learning of speech and language.

Reading Ability in Signing Deaf Children

This article reviews three types of claims proposing that knowledge of American Sign Language (ASL) facilitates reading development in deaf children. Arguments will be presented in support of a refinement of one such claim: That there is a relationship between ASL competence and reading. We argue that the relationship does not develop “naturally” but must be cultivated. There are conditions that enable associations to be made between ASL and reading including exposure to certain types of discourse settings that serve to highlight, signify, and direct attention to correspondences between different language systems.

Reading Ability in Signing Deaf Children

This article reviews three types of claims proposing that knowledge of American Sign Language (ASL) facilitates reading development in deaf children. Arguments will be presented in support of a refinement of one such claim: That there is a relationship between ASL competence and reading. We argue that the relationship does not develop “naturally” but must be cultivated. There are conditions that enable associations to be made between ASL and reading including exposure to certain types of discourse settings that serve to highlight, signify, and direct attention to correspondences between different language systems.

Early language and academic development in deaf children: Families with and without fathers

Early language and academic development in deaf children: Families with and without fathers

Language Development in Deaf Children

As we near the tenth anniversary of the report of the Commission on Education of the Deaf (Bowe, 1988), I believe our foremost challenge is to accelerate language development among deaf children and youths. The commission's report has led to some real progress overall in education of deaf children and youths (see, for example, Bowe, 1991, and Bowe, 1993). Nonetheless, we face stubborn problems. In this article, I present my personal views, to which I welcome reader reaction, about what I believe to be the most important of these. The challenge of which I write here is not an issue that government can or should address. As I put it in my keynote address to the 57th Biennial Conference of the Convention of American Instructors of the Deaf (CAID) in Minneapolis (Bowe, 1995b):

Sign language as the bridge across Deaf boundaries: a South African experience

ABSTRACT This article provides a discussion of some of the communication boundaries Deaf people encounter in a hearing world and the consequences of their seriously delayed language development on the social, emotional, educational and vocational aspects of their lives. Three related issues are addressed: early language development in Deaf children, approaches to Deaf education, and the results of a field study conducted at a school for the Deaf in South Africa. The background for the discussion is the new South African government's education and language policies which attempt to redress some of the injustices of the apartheid past. The role of sign language in education is emphasised as it is through the ability to communicate that the Deaf community will be empowered to assert their rights and gain acceptance as a minority group with a distinctive language and culture.

Theoretical and Epidemiological Aspects of Attention Deficit and Overactivity in Deaf Children

Disorders of attention deficit and overactivity, ADHD (DSM-IV), and hyperkinetic syndrome (ICD-10) are common and disabling. However, a number of factors in deaf children's development make the assessment of these disorders in deaf children problematic. The prevalence of ADHD and hyperkinetic disorder does not appear to be higher than expected in children with inherited deafness alone but does appear to be higher in children with acquired deafness and/or additional impairments. Data from a re-analysis of an earlier epdemiological study of psychiatric disorder in deaf children and adolescents suggests that these disorders are commoner than expected in deaf children and share the features of ADHD and hyperkinetic disorder seen in hearing children.

Patterns of Development of Intellectual Functions in Deaf Children 7-12 Years Old

Study of the developmental characteristics of higher mental functions in congenitally deaf children who otherwise have no primary mental defects should help us improve differential diagnosis of abnormal mental development in children with this sensory defect and further differentiate remedial, medical, and pedagogical measures that take into account the specifics of both the sensory defect and the cerebral anomaly. Much has been achieved in study of the distinctive features of cognitive development in deaf children, thanks to the efforts of Zh.I. Shif, T.V. Rozanova, N.V. Iakovleva, A.P. Gozova, and N.V. Iashkova [8,9]. Nevertheless, some aspects of the development of intellectual functions in the deaf and, in particular, the nature of the interrelations among the different mental functions in the process of individual development, have not been sufficiently studied at the different ontogenetic stages in children with this sensory impairment.