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The principal objective of this study was to evaluate, in 21 severely hearing impaired children (9 to 12 years old), the relative effects of length of stimuli by closed set identification tasks. (Author/SBH)

Speech discrimination scores for 13 deaf children were obtained in a classroom under: usual listening condition (hearing aid or not), binaural listening situation using auditory trainer/FM receiver with wireless microphone transmitter turned off, and binaural condition with inputs from auditory trainer/FM receiver and wireless microphone/FM transmitter. (Author/KW)

The study investigated whether the lower audible frequencies (often perceived by the deaf) contained sufficient prosodic features for 32 normal hearing listeners to correctly identify the intended emotions of the speakers. (Author)

Identity construction and how an individual chooses to navigate or display his or her identity play an important role in how that person communicates and interacts with others. One group for whom identity construction and navigation is a difficult process is the hard of hearing population. In the present study, Communication Theory of Identity (Hecht, 1993) and interactive interviews were used to gain insight into four layers of identity-personal, relational, enacted, and communal-in the hard of hearing individual. The authors discuss the themes within each identity layer and the gaps that are present between layers, as well as the implications of the identified layers and gaps.

The purpose of the study was to uncover and describe psycholinguistic and sociocognitive factors facilitating effective reading by signing adults who are profoundly deaf and do not use hearing technology. The sample comprised four groups, each consisting of 15 adults, for a total of 60 participants. The four groups were deaf high-achieving, deaf low-achieving, hearing high-achieving, and hearing low-achieving. Measurements included a language background interview and think-aloud reading discussion. Through the lens of a grounded theory approach, the conditions that facilitate effective reading were uncovered-by coding and categorizing themes, relating the codes and categories, and determining a central theme. It was found that there are similarities and differences in how deaf and hearing people process phonological codes and conceptualize language, and that access to varied instructional strategies and meaningful language experiences is an overarching theme in effective reading.

Pediatric cochlear implantation has successfully provided many congenitally deaf children the opportunity to learn to hear and speak. However, outcomes are mostly assessed through formal audiological testing or by gathering perspectives of parents and teachers rather than the children themselves. Sixty-five children with cochlear implants (CIs) aged 11-15 years were asked about their CI use and other factors related to communication, experiences of hearing loss, social participation and friendships, and psychological well-being. The findings revealed diverse experiences; e.g., 55.4% of the children reported feeling different from others their age, while 18.5% reported trying to hide their CIs often or all the time. The findings also suggested diversity in communication needs: 41.5% reported being interested in learning more sign language. The study highlights the importance of providing tailored, flexible support for a heterogeneous population of children with varied strengths and needs.

Infants enter the world prepared to learn about their environments and to become effective social partners, while most parents are equally prepared to support these early emergent skills. Through subtle, non-conscious behaviors, parents guide their infants in the regulation of emotions, language acquisition, and participation in social exchanges. For example, Deaf mothers modify their signed communication when it is directed to an infant, in much the same way that hearing adults vary their pitch and melodic contours when speaking to an infant. Both hearing and Deaf parents may also accommodate to an infant's hearing status during play interactions in ways that facilitate the child's attention to both the object and the social world. In the present study, such intuitive parenting behaviors were compared at infant ages 6, 9, 12, and 18 months, based on observations of Deaf and hearing mother-infant dyads.

The researchers evaluated the contribution of cochlear implants (CIs) to speech perception by a sample of prelingually deaf individuals implanted after age 8 years. This group was compared with a group with profound hearing impairment (HA-P), and with a group with severe hearing impairment (HA-S), both of which used hearing aids. Words and sentences were presented to the auditory channel alone, the visual channel alone, and the combined auditory-visual channel. Some of the results indicated better performance of the CI group than the HA-P group, thus indicating the advantage of CIs over hearing aids for "late" implantees, especially under difficult listening conditions. In addition, all participants relied on visual information under difficult auditory conditions. These last outcomes suggest that intervention with CI users should include exposure to visual as well as auditory information and should emphasize auditory-visual integration.

THE PSYCHIATRIC LITERATURE has described profoundly prelingually deaf people with psychosis who report hearing voices. The present study proposes that such reports in fact reflect the beliefs of professionals in mental health and deafness and not the hallucinatory experience of psychotic deaf people. The study demonstrates that it is functionally meaningless to assert that a prelingually profoundly deaf psychotic patient "hears voices," and provides a theoretical structure from which to consider more appropriately the internal experiences of deaf people with psychosis, and to encourage the clinically relevant articulation of these experiences. The authors also suggest that the "true" phenomenological experience is of secondary clinical interest to the meaning imposed upon it by the client and the distress caused by it.

Hemispheric specialization in the brain has become a focus of study in recent years in an effort to better understand language acquisition and use in deaf children. To test the hypothesis that better-ear hearing acuity in severely hearing-impaired children will interact differentially with cognitive performance because of hemispheric influence, 27 children with bilateral, severe to profound hearing loss were divided into two comparison groups and a control group and were given a series of cognitive tasks of increasing difficulty. The authors conclude that hemispheric interactions may take place and affect cognitive performance in ways predictable from hemispheric-specialization theory and hearing ability. We offer suggestions for the focus of future research on this question.

Precourse to postcourse measures were compared for an auditory training group and a control group on three auditory discrimination measures: (a) the training sentences, (b) related but nontrained sentences (decoy sentences), and (c) a modified rhyme test. The training group showed significant gains on both the trained sentences, as would be expected, and the decoy sentences. It was decided that decoy sentences are a good precourse to postcourse measure of auditory tiaining gains. Students at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) who use their hearing aids all or most of the time and score at least 25% on the Central Institute for the Deaf (CID) Everyday Sentence Test (Davis & Silverman, 1970) are recommended for the auditory train- ing program. A previous study on this training program demonstrated that students with at least this amount of auditory discrimination showed no drop in trained skills at 20 weeks post training (Snell & Managan, 1976). The evaluation measures used in that study were training materials. The present study was designed to investi- gate the students' ability to generalize the skills learned to materials on which they did not train. METHOD

This study was designed to examine the effectiveness of seven different methods of input upon the learning rate of hearing-impaired students. Different combinations of both unimodal and bimodal methods were utilized to teach Spanish number words to previously naive subjects. The results indicate that bimodal presentations are significantly more effective than unimodal approaches and that fingerspelling can be an important aid to learning for the subjects used in this study.

An audiovisual speechreading test was administered twice to three groups of normal-hearing subjects listening in a background of multitalker babble. The range of scores on the pretest resembled scores reported in the literature for severely hearing-impaired adults using similar test materials. On the second test presentation, one group of subjects received a monetary reward for guessing, another group was penalized for guessing, and a control group received no instructions about guessing strategy. Posttest scores of the two experimental groups were significantly different. Improvement in posttest scores shown by some subjects in the Control and the Reward Guessing groups was similar to improvement after speechreading training that has been reported by other investigators.

This study investigated the prevalence and characteristics of tinnitus in 331 children with profound hearing impairment. Tinnitus implies an auditory perception of internal origin (noise) rarely heard by others. In view of the medical significance of tinnitus in adults, it is reasonable to believe that the same in children may have significant implications for medical and rehabilitative management. In the current study, one out of every three children had tinnitus. This finding raises some professional challenges regarding the effect of tinnitus on the affected children's behavior and performance in school.

Precourse to postcourse gains in auditory training for 43 students were correlated to the follow- ing variables: (a) English ability at the onset of the course, (b) puretone average, (c) aided hearing discrimination, (d) hearing discrimination under phones, (e) the difference in hearing discrimi- nation under phones and with hearing aids, (f) improvement in English score during the training period, (g) speechreading with sound, (h) speechreading without sound, (i) auditory training pretest score, and (j) high frequency cutoff for the better ear. It was found that the variable most highly correlated with auditory training gains was the English score at the onset of the auditory training period. Students at the National Technical Insti- tute for the Deaf (NTID) who use their hearing aids all or most of the time and score between 25% and 70% on the Central Institute for the Deaf (CID) Everyday Sentence Test (Davis & Silverman, 1970) are encouraged to enroll in the Intermediate Auditory Training course. In a previous study (Mapes & Moreau, 1980), measurement tools for assessing auditory train- ing gains were reviewed. The measurement tools investigated included: the actual training materials, related but untrained materials (de- coy sentences), and a standardized measure (a modified rhyme test) that was both untrained on and unrelated to the training materials. The results of the study indicated that decoy sen- tences were a good measure of precourse to postcourse gains. The average gain on decoy sentences reported in that study was 33%. The present study was undertaken to determine those variables most related to success in audi- tory training as measured by percent gain on decoy sentences. The variables under investiga- tion were: (a) English ability at the onset of the course, (b) puretone average, (c) aided hearing discrimination, hearing discrimination under phones, (d) the difference in hearing discrimi- nation under phones and with hearing aids, (e) improvement in English score during the train- ing period, (f) speechreading with sound, (g) speechreading without sound, (h) pretest score on decoy sentences, and (i) high frequency cutoff for the better ear. These variables were a compilation of variables thought by the instruc- tors of auditory training to possibly be related to success in the course.