The term learning styles (LS) describes the notion that individuals have a preferred modality of learning (i.e., vision, audition, or kinesthesis) and that matching instruction to this modality results in optimal learning. During the last decades, LS has received extensive criticism, yet they remain a virtual truism within education. One of the…

Minimal expressions are at the heart of interaction: Interjections like "Huh?" and "Mhm" keep conversations flowing by establishing and reinforcing intersubjectivity among interlocutors. Crosslinguistic research has identified that similar interactional pressures can yield structurally similar words (e.g., to initiate repair…

This article aims to identify common errors made by hearing students learning South African Sign Language (SASL) and enhance the understanding of language acquisition in this context. The researchers formulated three hypotheses, attributing errors to vocabulary gaps, misunderstandings due to improper signing, and the dual impact of spoken and…

Young deaf and hard-of-hearing children enrolling in school in Sri Lanka often display language delay due to limited amplification and limited language stimulation. The scarcity of speech and language therapy support within the educational context at present necessitates a rethink of service-delivery models to reach more children. Multi-sensory…

Deaf individuals have been found to score lower than hearing individuals across a variety of memory tasks involving both verbal and nonverbal stimuli, particularly those requiring retention of serial order. Deaf individuals who are native signers, meanwhile, have been found to score higher on visual-spatial memory tasks than on verbal-sequential…

It is frequently assumed that deaf individuals have superior visual-spatial abilities relative to hearing peers and thus, in educational settings, they are often considered visual learners. There is some empirical evidence to support the former assumption, although it is inconsistent, and apparently none to support the latter. Three experiments…

For young deaf children a co-enrolment setting with hearing children in nursery school is recognised as a useful provision for inclusive education. The aim of the study reported in this article was to gain knowledge about pathways into literacy for young deaf children in a co-enrolment setting. The questions raised in this article are: How are…

This article reports on a study of literacy practices in a Norwegian preschool where deaf and hearing children are enrolled in the same group and where communication is based on both sign language and spoken language. The aim of the study was to explore pathways to literacy for young deaf children within this setting. Our implicit assumption is…

Presents study designed to determine whether interruption in the use of the manual encoding modality would retard learning in prelingually deaf subjects. One group of students used finger spelling and finger numeration in learning eight pairs of number-word combinations while the other group used no manual encoding. Results show groups using…

Novel word learning in three conditions (signed only, spoken only, signed and spoken combined) was compared for young children (N=10) with Down syndrome and mental-age matched controls. No group differences in frequency of imitations or productions were obtained. The frequency of imitations was highest in the combined condition. In the combined…