During the past few years, the teachers and staff at Kendall Demonstration Elementary School (KDES) have reviewed research to identify factors that positively impact language development for deaf and hard of hearing children, and established language and communication practices to reflect what they have learned. Based on the research, which…

Many children with autism communicate through the use of alternative communication systems, such as sign language. Limited research has been conducted on the situations under which sign language will be acquired across verbal operants without direct teaching. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate exposure to sign language on the…

We examined acquisition of grapheme-phoneme correspondences by 4 deaf and hard-of-hearing preschoolers using instruction from a curriculum designed specifically for this population supplemented by Visual Phonics. Learning was documented through a multiple baseline across content design as well as descriptive analyses. Preschoolers who used sign…

This systematic review of the literature provides a synthesis of research on the use of technology to support sign language. Background research on the use of sign language with students who are deaf/hard of hearing and students with low incidence disabilities, such as autism, intellectual disability, or communication disorders is provided. The…

The aim of this longitudinal case study was to describe bimodal and bilingual acquisition in a hearing child, Hugo, especially the role his Deaf family played in his linguistic education. Video observations of the family interactions were conducted from the time Hugo was 10 months of age until he was 40 months old. The family language was Swedish…

Over their 1st year of life, infants' "universal" perception of the sounds of language narrows to encompass only those contrasts made in their native language (J. F. Werker & R. C. Tees, 1984). This research tested 40 infants in an eyetracking paradigm and showed that this pattern also holds for infants exposed to seen language--American Sign…

Cochlear implants generated intense debate almost immediately following their introduction in the 1980s. Today, with a vast number of deaf individuals with cochlear implants, the debate about the cochlear implant device and mode of communication continues. Q-methodology was used in this study to explore cochlear implants and language acquisition…

This case study longitudinally analyzes and describes the changes of attentional expressions in interchanges between a pair of fraternal twins, 1 deaf and 1 hearing, from the age of 10-40 months, and their Deaf family members. The video-observed attentional expressions of initiating and reestablishing interchange were grouped in 5 functional…

Despite the current need for reliable and valid test instruments in different countries in order to monitor the sign language acquisition of deaf children, very few tests are commercially available that offer strong evidence for their psychometric properties. This mirrors the current state of affairs for many sign languages, where very little…

Child development researchers often discuss a "two-word" stage during language acquisition. However, there is still debate over whether the existence of this stage reflects primarily cognitive or linguistic constraints. Analyses of longitudinal data from two Deaf children, Mei and Cal, not exposed to an accessible first language (American Sign…

There is a current need for reliable and valid test instruments in different countries in order to monitor deaf children's sign language acquisition. However, very few tests are commercially available that offer strong evidence for their psychometric properties. A German Sign Language (DGS) test focusing on linguistic structures that are acquired…

Hearing parents of deaf or partially deaf infants are confronted with the complex question of communication with their child. This question is complicated further by conflicting advice on how to address the child: in spoken language only, in spoken language supported by signs, or in signed language. This paper studies the linguistic environment…

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…

We investigated the functional organisation of neural systems supporting language production when the primary language articulators are also used for meaningful, but nonlinguistic, expression such as pantomime. Fourteen hearing nonsigners and 10 deaf native users of American Sign Language (ASL) participated in an H[subscript 2][superscript…

Age of acquisition (AoA) effects have been used to support the notion of a critical period for first language acquisition. In this study, we examine AoA effects in deaf British Sign Language (BSL) users via a grammaticality judgment task. When English reading performance and nonverbal IQ are factored out, results show that accuracy of…