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The researchers investigated the effects of adult language input on the quantity of language, vocabulary development, and understanding of basic concepts of deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children who used listening and spoken language. Using audio recording and Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) software, the study involved 30 preschool DHH children who used spoken language as their communication modality and 11 typically hearing same-age peers. The children's language and the language spoken to them during all waking hours over a 2-day period (16 hours per day) were recorded and analyzed quantitatively and were compared to the children's performance on the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. The results highlight the relationship between the quantity of adult language and the language, vocabulary, and basic concept knowledge of DHH preschool children who use listening and spoken language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of deaf education has focused heavily on one major issue: the role of sign language and the rise of oralism as a means of suppressing the use of signs. This was a crucial debate which affected the lives of deaf children, informed social and cultural attitudes towards deafness and in many cases spurred resistance from deaf communities. However, other aspects of daily school life and the curriculum of Victorian and Edwardian deaf schools have rarely been commented upon. Focusing on the Cambrian Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, Wales' first deaf institution, this article will examine the teaching of writing and moral, religious and industrial education, all of which constructed an image of the intellectual and moral capabilities of the deaf child. The article will argue that deaf children were prescribed a moral and religious identity, and played an active role in wider Victorian and Edwardian discourses of education and childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Failing to acquire language in early childhood because of language deprivation is a rare and exceptional event, except in one population. Deaf children who grow up without access to indirect language through listening, speech-reading, or sign language experience language deprivation. Studies of Deaf adults have revealed that late acquisition of sign language is associated with lasting deficits. However, much remains unknown about language deprivation in Deaf children, allowing myths and misunderstandings regarding sign language to flourish. To fill this gap, we examined signing ability in a large naturalistic sample of Deaf children attending schools for the Deaf where American Sign Language (ASL) is used by peers and teachers. Ability in ASL was measured using a syntactic judgment test and language-based analogical reasoning test, which are two sub-tests of the ASL Assessment Inventory. The influence of two age-related variables were examined: whether or not ASL was acquired from birth in the home from one or more Deaf parents, and the age of entry to the school for the Deaf. Note that for non-native signers, this latter variable is often the age of first systematic exposure to ASL. Both of these types of age-dependent language experiences influenced subsequent signing ability. Scores on the two tasks declined with increasing age of school entry. The influence of age of starting school was not linear. Test scores were generally lower for Deaf children who entered the school of assessment after the age of 12. The positive influence of signing from birth was found for students at all ages tested (7;6-18;5 years old) and for children of all age-of-entry groupings. Our results reflect a continuum of outcomes which show that experience with language is a continuous variable that is sensitive to maturational age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "wall at the age of nine" is used to refer to the difficulty teaching deaf children Japanese case particles. As existing research has focused on verbs with which subjects and objects are symmetrical or interchangeable, it is difficult to grasp whether the children failed to understand the underlying deep cases or the surface cases (i.e., surface forms or case particles). In this study, we therefore conducted a test asking deaf children to choose the illustration that matched the sentence shown to them in their first language: Japanese Sign Language (JSL). The participants were deaf children aged 6 to 15 from Grade 1 of a deaf Elementary School to Grade 3 of Junior High School in Tokyo. The results show that until Elementary School Grades 3 and 4 (children aged 9-10), their encyclopedic knowledge and recognition of deep cases were not clearly separate, while older children became able to distinguish between the two. We concluded that deaf children have a fair understanding of deep cases and consider that, by utilizing the method of teaching Japanese as a second language to adults, we can develop teaching materials that allow deaf children to match the deep structure to the surface structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: There are very few measures of language development in spoken Greek that can be used with young deaf children. This study investigated the use of Cyprus Lexical List (CYLEX), a receptive and expressive vocabulary assessment based on parent report that has recently been adapted to Standard Greek, to measure the vocabulary development of deaf Greek-speaking children with cochlear implants. Design: A Standard Greek version of CYLEX was used to collect data on receptive and expressive vocabulary development from parents of thirteen deaf children with cochlear implants aged between 21 and 71 months. These data were compared with data collected previously from typically developing hearing Greek-speaking children. Results: Use of the test by parents of deaf children was found to be reliable. No correlation was found between children's vocabulary scores and chronological age. A positive correlation was however found between children's post-implant age and expressive vocabulary. The vocabulary skills of implanted children with a mean post-implant age of 20 months were not significantly different from those of typically developing hearing children of similar chronological age. Conclusion: CYLEX is a reliable and useful tool for exploring vocabulary development with this clinical group. Findings confirm the results of other studies in indicating that the vocabulary size of implanted pre-school-aged deaf children is related to the amount of time that children have used their implant, rather than chronological age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Abstract: Deaf children have significant difficulties in comprehending written text. This is mainly due to the hearing loss that prevents them from being exposed to oral language when they were an infant. However, it is also due to the type of educational intervention they are faced with, which accustoms them to decoding single words and isolated sentences, rather than entire texts. This paper presents an evolved version of a literacy web tool for deaf children based on stories and comprehension exercises. Two substantial improvements were made with the respect to the first version of our application. First, the text of the stories is now presented to children in the context of animated web pages. Second, intelligent dynamic feedback is given to the users when resolving the exercises. A preliminary evaluation study with deaf children, as the treatment group, and hearing children, as the control group, assessed the usability and effectiveness of the new system and its graphical interface. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Background: Only a small number of longitudinal studies have been conducted to assess the literacy skills of children with hearing impairment. The results of these studies are inconsistent with regard to the importance of phonology in reading acquisition as is the case in studies with hearing children. Colin, Magnan, Ecalle, and Leybaert (2007) revealed the important role of early phonological skills and the contribution of the factor of age of exposure to Cued Speech (CS: a manual system intended to resolve the ambiguities inherent to speechreading) to subsequent reading acquisition (from kindergarten to first grade) in children with deafness. The aim of the present paper is twofold: (1) to confirm the role of early exposure to CS in the development of the linguistic skills necessary in order to learn reading and writing in second grade; (2) to reveal the possible existence of common factors other than CS that may influence literacy performances and explain the inter-individual difference within groups of children with hearing impairment. Method: Eighteen 6-year-old hearing-impaired and 18 hearing children of the same chronological age were tested from kindergarten to second grade. The children with deafness had either been exposed to CS at an early age, at home and before kindergarten (early-CS group), or had first been exposed to it when they entered kindergarten (late-CS group) or first grade (beginner-CS group). Children were given implicit and explicit phonological tasks, silent reading tasks (word recognition and sentence comprehension), word spelling, and vocabulary tasks. Results: Children in the early-CS group outperformed those of the late-CS and beginner-CS groups in phonological tasks from first grade to second grade. They became better readers and better spellers than those from the late-CS group and the beginner-CS group. Their performances did not differ from those of hearing children in any of the tasks except for the receptive vocabulary test. Thus early exposure to CS seems to permit the development of linguistic skills necessary in order to learn reading and writing. The possible contribution of other factors to the acquisition of literacy skills by children with hearing impairment will be discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In May 2011 National Deaf Children's Society (NDCS) investigations revealed that almost one in five English local authorities were cutting vital specialist education services for vulnerable deaf children, despite the education budget being protected by the Government. This article looks in detail at why specialist education support for deaf children is so important, at the cuts that have been made and the impact they are having on deaf children and their teachers across the country [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes a development work whose focus was examining whether designing a game as an educational technology based on interdisciplinary dialogue between design and education can contribute to education of deaf children in learning a language. Through methods and techniques of design it was sought to identify how this area of knowledge can be part of the processes of teaching and learning in terms of developing learning materials to enhance the strategies of acquiring knowledge. The work was guided by the Multi-Tracks, which is a game to help the acquisition of a second language by deaf children. This game was developed in light of methods and techniques of design, under the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Design/Education - LIDE, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in partnership with the National Institute of Education for the Deaf in Rio de Janeiro-INES/RJ. The development work was particularly interested in designing learning materials for deaf children by considering their special traits and dialogue with the surrounding reality. Considering that educational technology research in special education is rather weak, it was thought that this work may contribute to this interdisciplinary area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report an analysis of lexical noun phrases (NPs) in narrative and expository texts written by Dutch deaf individuals from a bimodal bilingual perspective. Texts written by Dutch deaf children and adults who are either proficient in Sign Language of the Netherlands (SLN) or low-proficient in SLN were compared on structures that either overlap in Dutch and SLN (presence of overt subject and object NPs, NP modifiers, and NP-internal agreement), or are absent in SLN (articles). We found that deaf participants experienced significant difficulty with lexical NPs. Further, deaf proficiently signing children (but not adults) more often omitted obligate articles than deaf low-proficiently signing children. Deaf proficiently signing children and adults did not differ from low-proficiently signing children and adults, however, in the use of NP modifiers, NP-agreement errors and omissions of obligatory NPs. We conclude that proficiency in sign language seems to affect particularly those aspects that differ substantially across sign language and oral language, in this case, articles. We argue that adopting a bimodal bilingual approach is important to understand the writing of deaf children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a description of the interactions between a nursery-aged prelingually deaf1 child and his specialist teacher recorded at four consecutive time points during the first year at school. The child comes from a hearing, Somali-speaking family where English is an additional language (EAL). Using Conversation Analysis procedures, findings show how, with the teacher's support, the deaf child accomplishes 'multi-element' turns (that is, turns in which semantic referents are combined using words and gestures—'elements') within and across time points. Gestures remain an essential feature of the child's communication at all times. The teacher's prior and next turns create and support language learning opportunities for the child, and this support is continually adjusted in response to the child's turns. It is suggested that these sequences of talk are an important mechanism driving the child's learning of spoken English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to become expert readers of an alphabetical language like French, students must develop and adequately use phonological knowledge. Considering that the phonological knowledge used in reading largely comes from knowledge of the oral language, what happens when the oral language is not accessible, as is the case for many deaf children? In this study, graphophonemic and syllabic processes in pseudoword reading were assessed with a similarity judgment task. Gestual deaf subjects aged 10–18 years old ( N = 24) were compared to 24 age-matched hearing subjects. The results show that deaf readers are less sensitive to the graphemic and the syllabic structures of pseudo-words than hearing readers. In deaf subjects, the results are different than chance-level in the 13–15 and the 16–18-year-old groups. These results indicate that gestual deaf readers can develop phonological knowledge even in settings where sign language is promoted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of deaf children's early literacy raises fundamental issues about their access to language, experiences of early interaction and literacy development. However, we currently understand very little about how young deaf children develop literacy skills given their exceptional linguistic circumstances. This review explores early literacy practices in the homes of young deaf children to identify the commonalities and differences apparent in spoken language and sign bilingual homes. The introduction of the Newborn Hearing Screening Programme (NHSP), which is currently taking place, aims to diagnose congenital deafness in the first few weeks of life, followed by immediate involvement of a team of professionals with the child and family, including a teacher of the deaf. This provides a unique opportunity to explore early literacy practices in homes, and identify ways in which teachers and parents/carers can work collaboratively to facilitate deaf children's early literacy development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights the experimental diagnostic teaching clinic for hearing impaired children. A diagnostic teaching program was designed to correlate educational judgments of medical and paramedical personnel with those of teachers. The diagnostic teaching program was characterized by several unique features. Such features include a 1-1 teacher pupil ratio for 11 children, immediate attention to amplification needs, seminar sessions for teacher personnel conducted by an audiologist and psychologist, and provisions for medical or diagnostic reports as needed by the teachers. Each session, from which individual diagnostic teaching took place daily, was followed by group activities conducted by teacher aides. The evaluations by the teachers also included the administration on various tests, which were incorporated into the daily program.

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss articles in the issue on topics including the aspects of early development and intervention for deaf children, the use of a parent report tool to measure vocabulary development in deaf children with cochlear implants, and the role of clinicians in identifying communicative strategies that mothers of deaf children were using following early intervention.

The article presents several periodicals related to auditory impairments including "Panel on publications and public relations; convention of…Washington State School for the Deaf, Vancouver, Washington, June 28 to July 3, 1953," "Pure tone audiometry with young children; a procedure for detecting small losses of hearing," by Margaret Empey, "Use of the performance scale of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children with the deaf child," by E. Ellis Graham, "Towards a new understanding of the deaf child," by Helmer R. Myklebust and "Needs and objectives in teaching arithmetic to the deaf," by Thomas H. Poulos.