Minimal expressions are at the heart of interaction: Interjections like "Huh?" and "Mhm" keep conversations flowing by establishing and reinforcing intersubjectivity among interlocutors. Crosslinguistic research has identified that similar interactional pressures can yield structurally similar words (e.g., to initiate repair…

This case study described the oral expressive outcomes of five children with hearing loss who experienced prolonged auditory deprivation prior to participating in an auditory intervention. Expressive outcomes were measured by the number of spontaneous words and imitations. Visual analyses revealed that two of the five participants increased their…

This study followed the development of Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) proficiency in 31 deaf bimodal bilingual children (kindergarten through Primary 6) over two years. The Hong Kong Sign Language Elicitation Tool (HKSL-ET) was used at three time points to elicit the production of agreement, classifier, modal, negation, and wh-question structures.…

One of the most important achievements individuals accomplish is the development of a first language. However, many students who are deaf who use sign language to communicate struggle to become fluent in sign. One factor that hinders their language development is the fact that most of the adults they interact with do not sign well. The purpose of…

Young deaf and hard-of-hearing children enrolling in school in Sri Lanka often display language delay due to limited amplification and limited language stimulation. The scarcity of speech and language therapy support within the educational context at present necessitates a rethink of service-delivery models to reach more children. Multi-sensory…

Background: Deafness has an adverse impact on children's ability to acquire spoken languages. Signed languages offer a more accessible input for deaf children, but because the vast majority are born to hearing parents who do not sign, their early exposure to sign language is limited. Deaf children as a whole are therefore at high risk of language…

The reading skills of many deaf children lag several years behind those of hearing children, and there is a need for identifying reading difficulties and implementing effective reading support strategies in this population. This study embraces a balanced reading approach, and investigates the efficacy of applying multi-sensory coding strategies…

Background: The aim of this study was to examine the degree to which children with intellectual disability (ID) depend on manual signs during their expressive vocabulary acquisition, in relation to child and social-environmental characteristics. Method: Expressive vocabulary acquisition in speech and manual signs was monitored over a 2-year period…

Background: There is a dearth of assessments of sign language development in young deaf children. This study gathered age-related scores from a sample of deaf native signing children using an adapted version of the MacArthur-Bates CDI (Fenson et al., 1994). Method: Parental reports on children's receptive and expressive signing were collected…

In this article, we will describe the development of an assessment instrument for Sign Language of the Netherlands (SLN) for deaf children in bilingual education programs. The assessment instrument consists of nine computerized tests in which the receptive and expressive language skills of deaf children at different linguistic levels (phonology,…

Nine children suffering from Landau-Kleffner (L-K) syndrome and 25 children with developmental expressive disorders were tested for comprehension of English grammatical structures in spoken, written, and signed language modalities. L-K children demonstrated comprehension problems in all three language modalities and tended to treat language as…

Multilevel analyses compared performances of 12 deaf Jamaican adolescents (ages 15 and 16) and 12 hearing adolescents (ages 13 and 14) on writing, reading, and (for deaf subjects) sign language tasks. The deaf adolescents' ability to express complex ideas in sign language supported the need for use of a bilingual approach to the teaching of…

The use of Makaton signs was investigated with 49 British children (ages 4-13) with severe learning difficulties. Teacher-directed settings were associated with more use of signs but limited pragmatic functions. Free play settings were associated with less sign use but more varied functions. In both settings, most spoken and signed language was…