This Family and Practitioner Brief discusses how deaf children who have not had access to a complete language from birth often encounter unique challenges in developing academic language skills, particularly in the realm of inference-making.

Hearing loss adversely affects language and literacy development and reading difficulties of deaf and hard of hearing (d/Dhh) students are well documented by a large body of research. Effective instructional strategies that employ evidence-based strategies to support the reading development of d/Dhh students are required. Therefore, the purpose of…

More U.S. community college students are enrolling without the requisite reading skills to be successful. Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students are following a similar pattern with a little less than half requiring remedial instruction when entering college. College-age readers were the first population that we studied to learn about reading and…

Infants are born highly sensitive to the natural patterns found in languages. They use their perceptual sensitivity to acquire detailed information about the structure of languages in their environment. To date, most studies of infant perception and early language acquisition have investigated spoken/auditory languages and hearing infants (e.g.…

This qualitative research examines the types of metacognitive assessments used by teachers to describe d/Dhh students' metacognitive strategies. In other words, this study investigates three main points: first, teachers' perceptions regarding the use of metacognitive strategies during reading instruction; second, the types of metacognitive…

This study addresses the topic of visual communication and early sign language acquisition in deaf children with a Flemish Sign Language (Vlaamse Gebarentaal or VGT) input. Results are obtained through a checklist focusing on sign-exposed deaf children's visual communication and early sign language acquisition: the adapted VGT Visual Communication…

The reading comprehension levels of students who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) are low compared to those of their hearing peers. One possible reason for this low reading levels is related to the students' prior knowledge. This study investigated the potential factors that might affected DHH students' prior knowledge, including their degree of…

In Scandinavia and some other countries, a bilingual-bicultural approach to deaf education was celebrated in national programs from the mid-1980s until the broad popularity of cochlear implantation in middle 2000s created a shift back to an emphasis on spoken language for many deaf children. At the same time, only a few studies evaluated the…

A considerable amount of learning, especially in the early years, is incidental learning. What is incidental learning? It is learning that occurs simply through exposure to the environment--what people hear, see, and experience. It takes place in the natural course of events, without intentionally directed instruction about how or what to learn.…

Four experiments investigated classroom learning by deaf college students receiving lectures from instructors signing for themselves or using interpreters. Deaf students' prior content knowledge, scores on postlecture assessments of content learning, and gain scores were compared to those of hearing classmates. Consistent with prior research, deaf…

Four experiments investigated classroom learning by deaf college students receiving lectures from instructors signing for themselves or using interpreters. Deaf students' prior content knowledge, scores on postlecture assessments of content learning, and gain scores were compared to those of hearing classmates. Consistent with prior research, deaf…

Examined reasoning in normal, autistic, and deaf individuals. Found that deaf individuals who grow up in hearing homes without fluent signers show selective impairments in theory of mind similar to those of autistic individuals. Results suggest that conversational differences in the language children hear accounts for distinctive patterns of…

A study with 18 deaf high school students found that skills that actually contribute to reading proficiency included use of prior text information, prior knowledge, reading speed and consistency, use of active memory for function words and inflections, and correct processing of relative clauses and the passive voice. Instructional implications are…

The article suggests that English literacy can be acquired by deaf children through developmental reading and writing activities that refelct principles of first language acquisition as students relate these activities to experiences which they have already linguistically represented. (Author/CB)

A study examined: (1) whether making decisions (i.e. answering yes/no questions) about a brief prose passage enables children to detect logical inconsistencies in the passage; and (2) the extent to which hearing-impaired children differ from normal hearing children in their abilities to recognize logical inconsistencies in text. Subjects were 52…