Deaf children experience difficulties with reading comprehension. These difficulties are not completely explained by their difficulties with the reading of single short words. Whether deaf children and adults lag behind in the morphological processing of longer words is therefore examined in two experiments in which the processing of prefixes by…

Speakers monitor their speech output by listening to their own voice. However, signers do not look directly at their hands and cannot see their own face. We investigated the importance of a visual perceptual loop for sign language monitoring by examining whether changes in visual input alter sign production. Deaf signers produced American Sign…

English sentences containing the universal quantifiers "each", "every", and "all" are highly complex structures in view of the subtleties of their scope properties and resulting ambiguities. This study explored the acquisition of universal quantifier sentences as reflected in the performance of three diverse college-level student groups on a…

In the current study, we explore the influence of orthographic knowledge on phonological awareness in children with cochlear implants and compare developmental associations to those found for hearing children matched for word reading level or chronological age. We show an influence of orthographic knowledge on syllable and phoneme awareness in…

The present paper summarizes three experiments that investigate the effects of age of acquisition on first-language (L1) acquisition in relation to second-language (L2) outcome. The experiments use the unique acquisition situations of childhood deafness and sign language. The key factors controlled across the studies are age of L1 acquisition, the…

We tested the hypothesis that syntactic and narrative comprehension of a natural sign language can serve as the linguistic basis for skilled reading. Thirty-one adults who were deaf from birth and used American Sign Language (ASL) were classified as skilled or less skilled readers using an eighth-grade criterion. Proficiency with ASL syntax, and…

A total of 1,018 signs in one deaf child's naturalistic interaction with her deaf mother, between the ages of 19 and 24 months were analyzed. This study summarizes regular modification processes in the phonology of the child sign's handshape, location, movement, and prosody. First, changes to signs were explained by the notion of phonological…

Examined whether phonological decoding could be observed among severely and profoundly deaf children during reading. The ability of 20 deaf children to detect phonological similarities between three written pseudo words was investigated. Results suggest a link between sensitivity to phonology in written language and speech skills. Implications of…

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)

Presents study which explored metalinguistic abilities of prelingually deaf children who are users of Signed English with regard to their explicit segmentation of Signed English sentences into words. Subjects exhibited varying abilities that increased with age and were similar to developmental patterns in hearing populations. (Author/BK)

The accuracy of deaf adults' letter report was greater for real and nonsense words than for pseudowords, and error analysis shows deaf adults tend to produce orthographically regular responses. These findings indicate clearly the use of orthographic structure in word recognition. (MSE)

Examines the acquisition of conditional sentences in American Sign Language (which entail the use of both manual signs and grammaticized nonmanual facial expressions) by deaf children. The results indicate that children first acquire manual conditional signs before they employ obligatory grammaticized facial expressions, and also acquire manual…

Comparison of the performance of 25 deaf Italian adolescents and hearing controls on written grammatical tests found that the deaf subjects showed normal development in pluralization tasks, delayed development in pronoun tasks, and a qualitatively different pattern in an article task. (Author/CB)

Two studies investigated hearing-impaired students' ability to derive lexical and syntactic information about unknown words embedded in short passages of text. Implications for explaining, and trying to ameliorate, the well-documented vocabulary limitations of hearing-impaired students are discussed. (38 references) (JL)

Examines whether manually coded English (MCE) sign language systems are learnable. Reading achievement and expressive English skills of deaf students educated using only a MCE sign system were examined. Deaf students had expressive English skills comparable to hearing students in respect to syntactical and lexical skills but were deficient in…