A brief review is provided of recent research on the impact of early visual language exposure on a variety of developmental outcomes, including literacy, cognition, and social adjustment. This body of work points to the great importance of giving young deaf children early exposure to a visual language as a critical precursor to the acquisition of…

This study tested four complementary hypotheses to characterize intrinsic and extrinsic influences on the order with which preschool children learn the names of individual alphabet letters. The hypotheses included: (a) "own-name advantage," which states that children learn those letters earlier which occur in their own names, (b) the…