The purpose of this study was to compare three intervention conditions in virtual rapid word learning instruction for young children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH): traditional, general physical activity, and semantic richness physical activity. We focused on an initial step in learning a new word: mapping a word form to a referent.…

Purpose: Although deaf children typically exhibit severe delays in reading achievement, there is a paucity of research looking at their text-level comprehension skills. We present a comparison of deaf and normally hearing readers' profiles on a commonly used reading comprehension assessment: the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability II. Methods:…

Listening and spoken language (LSL) intervention and education have emerged as the preferred terms representing an intervention perspective that promotes "auditory oral" outcomes for many of today's children who are deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH), including those who are English learners. Practitioners (including speech-language…

In this article, we review the skills that have been found to be related to good story comprehension in novice readers with normal hearing and describe the relative weight each plays. The relationship between effective story comprehension and lower level skills (such as syntactic awareness and vocabulary knowledge) is considered, and the casual…

This review article starts with an overview of changing education paradigms and the literature on cognitive and linguistic relationships in imaginative play related to comprehension of oral and written texts. Strategies for developing the cognitive and linguistic foundations for text comprehension through play are described. A review of current…

To become successful readers, hearing children require competence in both decoding--the ability to read individual words, underpinned by phonological skills and letter-sound knowledge--and linguistic comprehension--the ability to understand what they read--underpinned by language skills, including vocabulary knowledge. Children who are born with a…

This study examined the discourse skills of deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children by comparing their oral and written narratives produced for the wordless picture book, "Frog, Where Are You?" (Mayer, 1969), with those of school-age-matched hearing peers. The written stories produced by 42 Italian 7- to 15-year-old children with…

Theory of Mind (ToM) is a foundational skill related to understanding the thoughts, beliefs, and desires of oneself and others. There are child factors that play an important role in the development of ToM (e.g., language and vocabulary) as well as environmental factors (e.g., conversations among family members and socioeconomic status). In this…

Working with students who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) can raise questions about whether language and literacy delays and difficulties are related directly to late and limited access to spoken language, to co-occurring language learning disabilities (LLD), or to both. A new Test of Integrated Language and Literacy Skills, which incorporates…