Limited access to spoken and signed language is a worldwide phenomenon affecting deaf children. Language delay caused by impeded language acquisition has negative cascading effects on deaf children's learning and development. In the event of stymied language development, deaf students exhibit highly errored writing and commit errors unseen in the…

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…

This study investigated the development of tense markers (e.g., past tense -ed) in children with cochlear implants (CIs) over a 3-year span. Nine children who received CIs before 30 months of age participated in this study at three, four, and five years postimplantation. Nine typical 3-, 4-, and 5-year- olds served as control groups. All children…

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…

A study of the signing of six deaf preschoolers found that they produced phonological and morphological errors, and semantic overgeneralizations, comparable to those made by hearing children when learning to speak. This suggests that deaf children actively construct sign language rules in the same way that hearing children build up the rules of…

A study examined aspects of the acquisition of spatialized morphology and syntax in American Sign Language (ASL) learned natively by deaf children of deaf parents. Children aged 2 to 8 were shown story books to elicit narratives, and the resulting use of verbs contained morphological forms not appearing in adult grammar. Analysis of the creative…

Articles on communication and language disorder are presented. All but one are in French; the other is in German. They include: "Specificity of Developmental Dysphasia: Implications for Intervention" (Marc Montfort, Adoracion Juarez Sanchez); "Difficulties with Language Development and Discursive Capacity" (Genevieve de Weck); "Language Production…