Purpose: Best practices recommend promoting the use of the home language and allowing caregivers to choose the language(s) that they want to use with their child who is deaf or hard of hearing (DHH). We examined whether Spanish-speaking caregivers of children who are DHH receive professional recommendations on oral bilingualism that follow best…

The auditory scaffolding hypothesis states that early experience with sound underpins the development of domain-general sequence processing abilities, supported by studies observing impaired sequence processing in deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) children. To test this hypothesis, we administered a sequence processing task to 77 DHH children who use…

Dialogic reading is an instructional strategy that has shown promise for supporting the reading development of children both with and without disabilities. Specifically, there may be positive effects of vocabulary knowledge, morphological knowledge, participation during reading, and emergent literacy skills. However, the knowledge base on the…

Purpose: Deaf children are frequently reported to be at risk for difficulties in executive function (EF); however, the literature is divided over whether these difficulties are the result of deafness itself or of delays/deficits in language that often co-occur with deafness. The purpose of this study is to discriminate these hypotheses by…

Interactive Writing (IW) is a powerful support for language and literacy development; however, its emphasis on using oral language to construct written language can present challenges for deaf/Deaf and hard of hearing (d/Dhh) students due to their unique and diverse language experiences. Teachers (n = 14) using Strategic and Interactive Writing…

A study of spontaneous sign language of six deaf children of hearing parents, examined three times in a 15-month period, is described. Processes and structures representative of and not representative of signed English were sought at various levels of linguistic complexity, including developing semantics, and compared with American Sign Language.…

Study indicates that hearing impaired residential students are more proficient users of American Sign Language than are hearing impaired children enrolled in local, public school programs, and older such residential students are more proficient in the language than are younger students. (SL)