Cumulating evidence suggests that the establishment of high-quality phonological representations is the "cognitive precursor" that facilitates the acquisition of language (spoken, signed, and written). The authors present two studies that contrast the nature of bilingual profoundly deaf children's phonological representations derived…

We adapted the semantic fluency task into British Sign Language (BSL). In Study 1, we present data from twenty-two deaf signers aged four to fifteen. We show that the same "cognitive signatures" that characterize this task in spoken languages are also present in deaf children, for example, the semantic clustering of responses. In Study…

Previous studies have asked whether visual sensitivity and attentional processing in deaf signers are enhanced or altered as a result of their different sensory experiences during development, i.e., auditory deprivation and exposure to a visual language. In particular, deaf and hearing signers have been shown to exhibit a right visual field/left…

The manual gestures that hearing children produce when explaining their answers to math problems predict whether they will profit from instruction in those problems. We ask here whether gesture plays a similar role in deaf children, whose primary communication system is in the manual modality. Forty ASL-signing deaf children explained their…

This volume presents the latest research from internationally recognized researchers and practitioners on language, literacy and numeracy, cognition, and social and emotional development of deaf learners. In their contributions, authors sketch the backgrounds and contexts of their research, take interdisciplinary perspectives in merging their own…

The aim of the present study was to investigate the role of executive functions (EF) in theory-of-mind (ToM) performance in deaf children and adolescents. Four groups of deaf children aged 7-16 years, with different language backgrounds at home and at school, that is, bilingually instructed native signers, oralist-instructed native signers, and…

This study investigates the relationship between theory of mind (ToM) skills in deaf children and input from their hearing mothers. Twenty-two hearing mothers and their deaf children (ages 4-10 years) participated in tasks designed to elicit talk about the mind. The mothers' mental state talk was compared with that of 26 mothers with hearing…

This report, arising from a 1991 meeting, provides an update to two of the six areas covered in the 1989 long-term plan of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. These include: (1) balance and the vestibular system; and (2) language and language impairments. For each area, the state of the art is reviewed, recent…

Communication methods for the hearing impaired are discussed in 12 conference papers. Papers from the United States are "Adjustment through Oralism" by G. Fellendorf, "Prospectus of Patterning" (a method of teaching speech to deaf children) by M.S. Buckler, and "Visual Monitoring of Speech by the Deaf" by W.…