Infants are born highly sensitive to the natural patterns found in languages. They use their perceptual sensitivity to acquire detailed information about the structure of languages in their environment. To date, most studies of infant perception and early language acquisition have investigated spoken/auditory languages and hearing infants (e.g.…

In Scandinavia and some other countries, a bilingual-bicultural approach to deaf education was celebrated in national programs from the mid-1980s until the broad popularity of cochlear implantation in middle 2000s created a shift back to an emphasis on spoken language for many deaf children. At the same time, only a few studies evaluated the…

Four experiments investigated classroom learning by deaf college students receiving lectures from instructors signing for themselves or using interpreters. Deaf students' prior content knowledge, scores on postlecture assessments of content learning, and gain scores were compared to those of hearing classmates. Consistent with prior research, deaf…

Examined reasoning in normal, autistic, and deaf individuals. Found that deaf individuals who grow up in hearing homes without fluent signers show selective impairments in theory of mind similar to those of autistic individuals. Results suggest that conversational differences in the language children hear accounts for distinctive patterns of…

A study examined: (1) whether making decisions (i.e. answering yes/no questions) about a brief prose passage enables children to detect logical inconsistencies in the passage; and (2) the extent to which hearing-impaired children differ from normal hearing children in their abilities to recognize logical inconsistencies in text. Subjects were 52…

There Groups of Students--19 hard of hearing, 20 deaf, and a control group of 36 typically developing hearing readers--were compared on their ability to process written words at the lexical level and on their comprehension of words within the structure of a sentence. Findings generally suggested that severe prelingual hearing loss does not prevent…