The susceptibility to gaze cueing in deaf children aged 7-14 years old (N = 16) was tested using a nonlinguistic task. Participants performed a peripheral shape-discrimination task, whereas uninformative central gaze cues validly or invalidly cued the location of the target. To assess the role of sign language experience and bilingualism in deaf…

Examination of the nature and quality of deaf children's referential messages to their mothers, the outcome of such messages, and the reformulations of "failed" messages. Deaf children 6-10 years old, from oral or bimodal educational programs, were tested in two tasks involving identification and description of a picture. (Author/BN)

Two studies investigated the effect of language input on theory of mind by comparing the performance of deaf native-signing children (ages 4 to 8) raised by deaf signing parents and deaf late-signing children raised by hearing parents on "thought picture" measures of theory of mind. Findings indicated that deaf late signers showed…

Investigated associations between expressive language and symbolic play in deaf children with deaf parents or with hearing parents, and hearing children with hearing parents. Defined three language level groups. Hearing status was associated with duration of symbolic play. Higher language levels were associated with more canonically sequenced and…

Studied across a 16-month period, young children of deaf parents showed accelerated early language development, on the average producing their first recognizable sign at 8.5 months, their tenth sign at 13.2 months, and their first sign combination at 17.0 months. Findings are inconsistent with previously reported patterns of synchrony between…

Channel properties of the deaf children's gesture language are discussed in the light of their communicative behavior. (Author)