Parents' involvement is highly needed for ensuring holistic development of their words; however parents can only assist the child when they themselves have adequate knowledge, required skills, and proper awareness regarding various aspects of children's growth and development. To have adequate communication skill among parents, ensuring better…

Expressive language is an important skill to develop in children with intellectual disabilities. It not only aids in decreasing the likelihood of challenging behaviors from occurring but also aids in increasing the individuals independence and assistance in them becoming successful members of society. No previous studies have examined the…

Babysign classes are increasingly popular across the UK. Benefits are said to include increasing child vocabulary, reducing frustration, and improving parent-child relations. A further relationship between the use of babysign and maternal mind-mindedness (MM) has been suggested. It was hypothesized here that parents choosing babysign classes would…

Researchers have used various theories to explain deaf individuals' reading skills, including the dual route reading theory, the orthographic depth theory, and the early language access theory. This study tested 4 groups of children--hearing with dyslexia, hearing without dyslexia, deaf early signers, and deaf late signers (N = 857)--from 4…

The study focuses on the self-esteem of deaf and hard of hearing (D/HH) students from Slovenia. A total of 80 D/HH students from regular and special primary schools (grades 6-9) and from regular and special secondary schools (grades 1-4) completed the Self-Esteem Questionnaire (Lamovec 1994). For the entire group of D/HH students, the results of…

A brief review is provided of recent research on the impact of early visual language exposure on a variety of developmental outcomes, including literacy, cognition, and social adjustment. This body of work points to the great importance of giving young deaf children early exposure to a visual language as a critical precursor to the acquisition of…

It is well documented that attrition in the postsecondary settings for students who are deaf or hard of hearing is greatly due to their academic and communication skills, as well as pre-entry attributes. However there is little evidence that indicates why students who are deaf or hard of hearing are successful in the postsecondary setting. This…

Fourteen students in "Comparative Linguistics: American Sign Language & English" (ASL 220) embarked on a class project focused on linguistic variation during the spring 2007 semester at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College (JSRCC). This class project required students to apply various skills learned in the course, including…

Capacity limits in linguistic short-term memory (STM) are typically measured with forward span tasks in which participants are asked to recall lists of words in the order presented. Using such tasks, native signers of American Sign Language (ASL) exhibit smaller spans than native speakers ([Boutla, M., Supalla, T., Newport, E. L., & Bavelier, D.…

We tested the hypothesis that syntactic and narrative comprehension of a natural sign language can serve as the linguistic basis for skilled reading. Thirty-one adults who were deaf from birth and used American Sign Language (ASL) were classified as skilled or less skilled readers using an eighth-grade criterion. Proficiency with ASL syntax, and…