The High Quality Communication intervention aims to stimulate interpersonal communication between individuals with congenital deaf-blindness (CDB) and their social partners. Found effective in multiple-case experiments, the intervention is based on Trevarthen's theory of intersubjective development (Bråten & Trevarthen, 2007), which describes…

Earlier indentification has increased the number of infants identified with hearing loss. A significant and growing proportion of children who are D/deaf or hard of hearing have a disability (DWD). Literature related to infants and toddlers who are DWD is scarce because of the heterogeneity of the population and because many disabilities may go…

Children with deafblindness need support to be able to understand the world and to have access to information. The authors analyzed a dyad consisting of a child with congenital deafblindness and a specialized teacher. The study included participant observations and audiovisual recordings. It was found that the child showed attention to the teacher…

The investigators compared the perceived attainment of developmental tasks by 181 German adolescents with hearing loss and 254 peers without hearing loss. The adolescents with hearing loss were attending special schools for students who are deaf or hard of hearing. On average, the two groups perceived similar levels of success across the assessed…

A. Baddeley's model of the working memory of congenitally deaf persons is examined in light of research on encoding by this population. It is concluded that a model of the working memory of the deaf must include subsystems for articulatory, sign, and visual encoding. (Author/DB)

Research on cytomegalovirus (CMV), a herpes virus causing neurological damage (hearing problems and/or mental retardation) in 10 percent of infants born with the condition, is reviewed. Incidence of hearing and retardation in CMV cases is reported and current treatment described. (CL)

Using national survey data, this study found that the smoking prevalence among postlingually deafened adults was not significantly different than hearing adults. Prelingually deafened adults were found to be less likely to smoke than hearing adults, even though they had less education and lower incomes, factors usually associated with higher…

This paper examines hearing aid use by 60 congenitally deaf individuals who attended special education units in South Australia. The study indicates that only one-third to half of deaf adults wore their hearing aids in social situations for speech detection. Just over one-third (n = 22) of the deaf adults involved in this study wore their hearing…

Code switching (between oral and manual communication ) was examined with seven prelingually deaf adults. Deaf signers with deaf parents who learned American sign language (ASL) at an early age evidenced the most code switching behavior and the most English-like signed segments. Early signers with hearing parents were least likely to vary from…

Prelingually deaf college students (N=100) produced sentence completions that were similar in pattern to sentences previously produced by hearing college students. It was concluded that the sentence comprehension task was tapping similar linguistic and semantic skills in hearing and deaf students. (Author/MC)

A descriptive study of the incidence of semi-intelligible or better speech among 108 National Technical Institute for the Deaf students with congenital hearing loss greater than 91 decibels is presented. (Author/PHR)

Empirical data on the development of interaction, communication, and language in deafblind children is very rare. To fill this gap, a case study was conducted in which the interaction between a teacher and a deafblind boy age 3 years 4 months was analyzed. Sequential analysis of their interaction confirmed some general clinical impressions about…

One hundred eighty-eight congenitally deaf high school students were given sentence comprehension tests in order to determine which if any of four possible hypotheses--developmental lag, the method of sentence presentation, teaching methodology and acquisitional modality--explained the observed syntactic deficit in the deaf language user. (PHR)

Survey respondents from 45 residential and day schools for the deaf found that, of 151 prelingually deaf children who had received cochlear implants, 71 were no longer using the implant. Numerous comments by respondents indicated their discouragement with the results of the implants. Children still using the implants were concentrated in three…

This study examined the short term recall of serially presented verbal information by 49 prelingually deafened and 39 hearing students (mean grade level 6). Findings suggest that neither discrepancy in the ordered short-term recall of verbal materials nor discrepancies in reading comprehension are directly assignable to differences in memory…