Purpose: Caregivers of deaf/hard of hearing infants are faced with challenging decisions regarding their child's communication method. The purpose of the current research note is to characterize the advice that caregivers receive and value as well as the factors that influence caregivers' decision making. Method: The current study enrolled 105…

Purpose: Early language input plays an important role in child language and cognitive development (e.g., Gilkerson et al., 2018; Hart & Risley, 1995). In this study, we examined the effects of child's hearing status on lexical repetition properties of speech produced by their caregivers with normal hearing (NH). In addition, we investigated…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to assess the listening behavior and social engagement of cochlear implant (CI) users and normal-hearing (NH) adults in daily life and relate these actions to objective hearing outcomes. Method: Ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) collected using a smartphone app were used to probe patterns of listening…

Purpose: The current study was aimed at understanding the benefits and shortcomings of direct-to-consumer hearing devices (DCHDs) by analyzing the large text corpus of secondary data generated from Amazon customer reviews. Method: Secondary data were generated manually by gathering user feedback for 62 different DCHDs (cost range: $9.95-$635) on…

This study of the role of communicative context in the speech perception of 31 individuals with severe-to-profound hearing impairment who were wearing hearing aids found that when response was preceded by a question, comprehension of answers improved, and that time delay and the relatedness of the reply to the question interacted in degree of…

Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that visual information related to segmental versus prosodic aspects of speech is distributed differently on the face of the talker. Results indicate that information in the upper part of the talker's face is more critical for intonation pattern decisions than for decisions about word segments…

Deaf (N=20) and hearing (N=20) children were observed during play with their hearing mothers at 22 months and 3 years. The deaf children were severely language delayed, with deaf 3-year-olds using less language (speech or sign) than hearing 22-month-olds. Since mothers used primarily speech, deaf children received much less communication input…

This cross-sectional study examined communicative function in children (ages 12-54 months either with profound hearing loss but learning spoken English for communication) or with normal hearing. Data suggested somewhat different patterns of communication function development between the groups. Also, the use of language for social purposes was…

A study examined how 20 adults with postlingual deafness with cochlear implants combined visual information from lip reading with auditory cues in an open-set word recognition task. Word recognition performance was highest for audiovisual presentation followed by auditory-only and then visual-only stimulus presentation, and for single-talker…