Background: Two intervention approaches are implemented in South Africa to alleviate the deleterious consequences of congenital or early onset hearing impairment on language acquisition and subsequent poor learning outcomes. Aim: This study investigated the learning outcomes of foundation phase learners with severe to profound hearing impairment…

Eng and Chang Bunker (1811--1874) were conjoined twins of Chinese ethnicity born in Siam (today, Thailand). Before the Civil War, they toured the United States to exhibit themselves as a "human curiosity," a wonder of nature, their conjoined state documented by local doctors at each stop on their tours, and their exhibition touted as…

Educators and children with congenital deaf-blindness experience major challenges in building interactions that are reciprocated and sustained. Studies have shown that affect attunement and sensitive responsiveness are crucial for a child to feel recognized and for synchronizing early conversations. The authors previously presented the Diagnostic…

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…

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 basic tenet of developmental neurobiology is that certain areas of the cortex will re-organize, if appropriate stimulation is withheld for long periods. Stimulation must be delivered to a sensory system within a narrow window of time (a sensitive period) if that system is to develop normally. In this article, we will describe age cut-offs for a…

Deafness, profound hearing loss, is a global problem. However, the causes of, attitudes toward, and management options for deafness differ considerably from region to region. This study seeks to identify the present causes of profound sensorineural hearing loss in Nigeria, which in our environment is almost synonymous to a life sentence of silence…

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)

Tape recorded utterances of a three-year child who was born without cochleas were examined in order to assess the effect of total deafness on vocalization development. Results suggest that although hearing impairment slows the onset of canonical babbling, even total deafness does not preclude its eventual appearance. (33 references) (Author/VWL)

This study compared 20 prelingually profoundly deaf adolescents (age 11-16 years) and 20 matched, hearing adolescents on a picture-sequencing task and a social judgment test. Results did not support the hypothesis that deaf adolescents possess significantly poorer knowledge about social reasoning than hearing peers but it did support the…

As part of an ongoing evaluation of the Tactile Vocoder, a device that allows the acoustic waveform to be felt as a vibrational pattern on the skin, two prelingually profoundly deaf teenagers reached criterion on a 50-word vocabulary (live voice, single speaker) after 28.5 and 24.0 hours of training. (Author/DB)

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…

The relation between partial or absent hearing and control of the voicing contrast has long been of interest to investigators, in part because speakers who are born deaf characteristically have great difficulty mastering the contrast and in part for the light it can cast on the role of hearing in the acquisition and maintenance of phonological…

Findings of this study with prelingually deaf people (n=59) in Sweden suggested there is some loneliness in the deaf community; there are characteriological, interactional, and situational origins of loneliness in the deaf community; and there is a high awareness about both the existence of loneliness and explanations for it. (DB)

The performance of 17 prelingually severely and profoundly hearing-impaired subjects on the Speech Pattern Contrast Test (Version II) was evaluated. Although performance on most of the contrast subtests was significantly correlated with phoneme and word recognition, intercorrelations among most subtests were also significant. (Author/DB)