Hearing-impaired speakers show changes in vowel production and formant pitch and variability, as well as more cases of overlapping between vowels and more restricted formant space, than hearing speakers; consequently their speech is less intelligible. The purposes of this paper were to determine the differences in vowel formant values between 32…

Auditory perception with cochlear implants (CIs) enables the majority of deaf children with normal learning potential to develop (near) age-appropriate spoken language. As a consequence, a large proportion of children now attend mainstream education from an early stage. The acoustical environment in kindergartens and schools, however, might be…

Meeting the audiological management needs of deaf children with learning disabilities is demanding. The study specifically focused on the age at which audiological certainty, the degree, configuration and type of hearing loss, was established in 20 individuals with severe learning disability. Audiological records relating to each individual were…

The present study investigated the conversational skills of a group of 18 children (aged 6 to 16 years) with severe and profound hearing loss. Participants included both hearing aid users and cochlear implant users. All the children relied upon spoken English and were included in regular classroom settings for at least part of each school day.…

This action research study investigated the impacts of teaching strategies based on the balanced literacy approach on story grammar acquisition of three Turkish students with hearing loss. Data were collected from students' work, archival information, interviews and observations during lessons which were audio- and video-recorded. The pre- and…

Following the development and standardization of the British Sign Language (BSL) Receptive Skills Test (Herman et al., 1999), the test was made widely available to professionals working with deaf children. Test users were asked to return completed score-sheets on individual children they had tested in order to compare a selection of children from…

This study compared reciprocal utterances of six hearing mother-hearing toddler dyads and six hearing mother-deaf toddler dyads. Child participants were matched by language stage based on Brown's stages of morphological development and were aged between 25 and 45 months. Child participants were observed interacting with their mothers during…

This study examined the relationship between identity patterns and the communication modes of deaf adolescents aged between 14 and 18 years in Turkey. They were currently being educated in state residential secondary schools for the deaf. Deaf adolescents were administered the "Deaf Identity Scale" presented in Turkish using total…

Maternal scaffolding of pretend play was investigated in ten hearing mother/hearing child (Hh) dyads and ten hearing mother/deaf child (Hd) dyads. Three videotaped samples of play interaction were collected when the children were 28, 29 and 30 months of age. The videotapes were segmented according to four levels of maternal participation (dyadic…

This study evaluated school functioning of a sample of children with hearing impairments who were mainstreamed in regular educational settings. Participants comprised 47 children aged 7;2 to 9;3 years with various degrees and types of hearing loss. Teachers evaluated the children using the Hebrew version of the Screening Instrument For Targeting…

Children with hearing loss and their families are now presenting for early intervention support and guidance at increasingly younger ages. At present there is a paucity of research that informs teachers about early language development in the child with hearing loss. Di-EL First Words (Di-EL) is a diary technique through which parents record their…

This paper examines the construct of evidence-based practice, how existing data on the effectiveness of the Auditory-Verbal (A-V) approach for children with hearing loss are evaluated within this construct, and whether implementation of an A-V intervention model is therefore justified. It concludes with a recurrent call for action towards…

This article presents results related to the impact on educational support services of the introduction of the first phase of the national Newborn Hearing Screening Programme (NHSP) in England. This study was funded by the Department of Health and undertaken as one element of a national evaluation of NHSP across a range of domains. It presents…

Deaf students at two institutions of higher education and hearing students taking the same degree programmes completed the Course Experience Questionnaire and a short version of the Approaches to Studying Inventory. The deaf students were just as likely as the hearing students to adopt a meaning orientation to their studies but were more likely to…

This paper focuses on the oral referential communication skills of hearing-impaired (HI) children. A task based on that used with language impaired children by Leinonen and Letts (1997) was used to assess the speaking and listening skills of 20 HI children (mean age=10;2 years; mean better ear average hearing loss=88.85 dBHL). Their performance…