Purpose: Children with cochlear implants (CIs) have difficulty with literacy, and although it is established that phonological processing underlies literacy skills in children with typical hearing (TH), the relation of phonological processing and literacy in children with CIs is not fully understood. This study evaluated the contributions of…

Purpose: Although the speech intelligibility index (SII) has been widely applied in the field of audiology and other related areas, application of this metric to cochlear implants (CIs) has yet to be investigated. In this study, SIIs for CI users were calculated to investigate whether the SII could be an effective tool for predicting speech…

Our study compares the intelligibility of French-speaking children with a cochlear implant (N = 13) and age-matched children with typical hearing (N = 13) in a narrative task. This contrasts with previous studies in which speech intelligibility of children with cochlear implants is most often tested using repetition or reading tasks. Languages…

Purpose: Children who are deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH) are at increased risk for neurocognitive delays, which can have cascading effects on development. Associations between neurocognition and the content of parental language--specifically the use of mental state vocabulary--have been observed in typically hearing (TH) children. This study…

Purpose: Previous evidence supports benefits of bilateral hearing aids, relative to unilateral hearing aid use, in laboratory environments using audio-only (AO) stimuli and relatively simple tasks. The purpose of this study was to evaluate bilateral hearing aid benefits in ecologically relevant laboratory settings, with and without visual cues. In…

Recent evidence suggests that deaf children with CIs exposed to nonnative sign language from hearing parents can attain age-appropriate vocabularies in both sign and spoken language. It remains to be explored whether deaf children with CIs who are exposed to early nonnative sign language, but only up to implantation, also benefit from this input…

Purpose: Differences across language environments of prelingually deaf children who receive cochlear implants (CIs) may affect language acquisition; yet, whether mothers show individual differences in how they modify infant-directed (ID) compared with adult-directed (AD) speech has seldom been studied. This study assessed individual differences in…

Purpose: In spite of improvements in language outcomes for children with hearing loss (HL) arising from cochlear implants (CIs), these children can falter when it comes to academic achievement, especially in higher grades. Given that writing becomes increasingly relevant to educational pursuits as children progress through school, this study…

The academic achievement of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students depends on the interaction of many factors, including student and family characteristics and experiences inside and outside school. Several questionnaires have previously been designed for evaluating the listening skills of deaf English-speaking children in school environments.…

Purpose: In individuals with cochlear implants, speech recognition is not associated with tests of working memory that primarily reflect storage, such as forward digit span. In contrast, our previous work found that vocoded speech recognition in individuals with normal hearing was correlated with performance on a forward digit span task. A…

Purpose: Cochlear implants (CIs) transmit a degraded version of the acoustic input to the listener. This impacts the perception of harmonic pitch, resulting in deficits in the perception of voice features critical to speech prosody. Such deficits may relate to changes in how children with CIs (CCIs) learn to produce vocal emotions. The purpose of…

Theory of Mind--the understanding that people have thoughts, wants, and beliefs that influence their interpersonal behavior--is an aspect of social cognition that develops with consistent, increasing complexity across age groups, languages, and cultures. Observed delays in theory of mind development among deaf children and others has led to a…

This study explored possible associations of social maturity, executive function (EF), self-efficacy, and communication variables among deaf university students, both cochlear implant (CI) users and nonusers. Previous studies have demonstrated differences between deaf and hearing children and young adults in EF and EF-related social and cognitive…

Children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) are at higher risk of developing mental health problems. This study reports on the parent and teacher ratings of emotional and behavioural difficulties (EBD) in 5-year old DHH children. It explores the similarities and differences between informants, and the risk and protective factors associated with…

Various studies have examined psychosocial functioning and language abilities among deaf children with and without cochlear implants (CIs). Few, however, have explored how relations among those abilities might change with age and setting. Most relevant studies also have failed to consider that psychosocial functioning among both CI users and…