With approximately 310,000 Deaf Canadians, and another approximately 2.8 million hard-of-hearing Canadians, Deaf and hard-of-hearing people make up a significant portion of the Canadian population. This population is hard to quantify and describe due to its inherent diversity. Generally, the community is divided into those who follow an oral…

A follow-up study examined the effects of different tactile aids on tasks of visual speech reading in 14 adults with severe hearing impairments. Compared with speech reading alone, tactile aids impaired sentence-based speech reading at first, although performance improved with training. No effects of vibrotactile aids or training were obtained for…

Hearing-impaired speechreaders use linguistic context to compensate for the poor visibility of some speech movements. Constraints on spoken language enhance speechreading performance and help compensate for the paucity of sensory data. The largest effects come from linguistic constraints imposed by sentence context--syntactic, semantic, and…

A 4-year study of 131 preschool children with severe/profound hearing losses found that children tended to be placed first in auditory/oral programs and later moved to total communication programs. Evaluated are the performance of children in both types of programs on measures of spoken language, receptive language, and mother-child communication.…

Martin Luther King's speech is examined as a sermon in the Black Baptist tradition. The speech, which is a dialog between speaker and audience, has, in addition to the "message" contained in the code, a broader ethnographic meaning. The speech event itself is metaphorical in nature, signaling political protest. (Author/BJV)

Deaf children (N=52) were administered a videotaped presentation of a vocabulary test under one of five conditions: Total Communication (TC) with audio; TC without audio; Manual Communication (MC) with no mouth movement; Oral Communication (OC) with audio; and OC without audio. Modes using MC or TC yielded performances significantly superior to OC…

A study investigated whether differences in working memory could account for variance in word recognition and receptive vocabulary skills of children (ages 5-16) using oral communication (n=32) and total communication (n=29). A contribution from working memory was observed only for the span tasks that incorporated an auditory processing component.…

Seventy-two deaf Ss (10- to 19-years-old) were tested, employing the Test of Syntactic Ability (TSA), the language sub-tests of the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT), and analyses of written language samples, in a study of the influence of early language and communication environment on their later syntactic language ability. Ss were divided into…

An Australian oral/aural program for students with hearing impairments fosters independence and independent learning by teaching cognitive and metacognitive skills. Factors attributing to the program's success include careful planning for integration, a clear understanding of support teachers' roles, special programs to meet individual needs, and…

This study investigated factors contributing to auditory, speech, language, and reading outcomes in 136 children (ages 8-9) with prelingual deafness after 4-6 years of cochlear implants. While child and family characteristics accounted for 20% of outcome variance, the primary rehabilitative factor was educational emphasis on oral-aural…

A study involving 20 children (ages 4-9) using cochlear implants compared the articulation of those who used oral communication only (n=10) and those who used total communication (TC). Results from the Goldman-Fristoe Test of Articulation indicate those using only oral communication committed significantly fewer errors than TC users. (Contains…

Production of 19 word-initial two-segment consonant clusters was examined in 12 children (ages 6-16) with cochlear implants, including 6 using oral communication and 6 using total communication. Results showed that 48% of the clusters were correctly produced (75% correct for oral communication users and 21% correct for total communication users).…

A study examined the speech intelligibility of children (ages 1-15) with deafness who use hearing aids. Data revealed a strong significant trend toward higher intelligibility for children with more residual hearing, and a significant trend toward higher intelligibility for users of oral communication than those using total communication. (Contains…

This study examined whether the level of academic achievement changed when deaf pupils in Sweden were introduced to sign communication at the preschool or kindergarten level. The study compared performance of 40 deaf students, attending a school for the deaf, on a comprehensive testing program (covering Swedish language and mathematical and…