Background: Early intervention is recommended for pre-school children with low language. However, few robustly evaluated language interventions for young children exist. Furthermore, in many interventions the theoretical underpinnings are underspecified and the 'active ingredients' of the interventions not tested. This paper presents a…

This article investigates the narrative skills of children acquiring Finnish Sign Language (FinSL). Producing a narrative requires vocabulary, the ability to form sentences, and cognitive skills to construct actions in a logical order for the recipient to understand the story. Research has shown that narrative skills are an excellent way of…

Research has demonstrated that deaf children of deaf signing parents (DOD) are afforded developmental advantages. This can be misconstrued as indicating that no DOD children exhibit early language delays (ELDs) because of their early access to a visual language. Little research has studied this presumption. In this study, we examine 174 ratings of…

The first step in engaging deaf and hard of hearing children in language-rich environments is getting their attention. Hearing teachers intuitively raise their voices as they enter their classes to get students' attention; Deaf teachers intuitively wait for the students to look at them. Deaf sign language teachers report that when hearing students…

Young children do not develop language skills by studying grammar and rules for forming sentences. Children's brains are wired to acquire language naturally; all they need is exposure. Many opportunities for language learning are lost to deaf children if they are not surrounded by other signers. In fact, the loss can be so severe that deaf and…

This qualitative study focused on the synergistic experience of a group of Deaf and hearing participants during a 2-week international study-abroad program to investigate the impact of immersing hearing American Sign Language (ASL) undergraduate majors with culturally Deaf faculty and doctoral students. 20 participants included undergraduate…

This study investigates the communication practices of four teachers in 3rd to 6th grade classrooms with 9 deaf students with limited language proficiency and in stages of emergent writing development. Analyzing language modalities, utterance types, and class interactivity, we found that teachers using American sign language used student-centered…

This study followed the development of Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) proficiency in 31 deaf bimodal bilingual children (kindergarten through Primary 6) over two years. The Hong Kong Sign Language Elicitation Tool (HKSL-ET) was used at three time points to elicit the production of agreement, classifier, modal, negation, and wh-question structures.…

The purpose of this research is to describe the challenges and factors causing difficulties of deaf students in mastering writing skills at inclusive universities in Indonesia. This research is focused in Central Java province because of the more universities are considered as inclusive universities. This research was conducted in…

Writing is an essential element of literacy development, and language plays a central role in the composing process, including developing, organizing, and refining ideas. Language and writing are interconnected, making it paramount for educators to attend to the development of deaf students' language skills. In this quasi-experimental study, we…

This study aims to document the implementation of sign bilingualism and co-enrollment education in a kindergarten in Quzhou, Zhejiang Province, China, to identify the major characteristics of the programme, and to report findings of children's language in terms of vocabulary and surveys on the views and attitudes of the stakeholders of the…

Understanding the multilingual language context of deaf children's lives provides an essential knowledge base from which to develop the early support of children and families. Current models of early support tend to draw on Euro-Western understandings of the multilingual lives of families of deaf children and assume an established infrastructure…

Deaf children of hearing parents (DOH) are at risk for early language delays (ELD) due to environmental and etiological factors, compounding the previously reported higher incidence of ELD in deaf children of deaf parents (DOD) compared to the general population. Archival data from the online database of the Visual Communication and Sign Language…