Previous research has hypothesized that human sequential processing may be dependent upon hearing experience (the "auditory scaffolding hypothesis"), predicting that sequential rule learning abilities should be hindered by congenital deafness. To test this hypothesis, we compared deaf signer and hearing individuals' ability to acquire…

The term learning styles (LS) describes the notion that individuals have a preferred modality of learning (i.e., vision, audition, or kinesthesis) and that matching instruction to this modality results in optimal learning. During the last decades, LS has received extensive criticism, yet they remain a virtual truism within education. One of the…

Recent research shows that deaf signers show increased behavioral and neural sensitivity to certain types of movement, such as biological motion, human actions, and signing avatars. However, other work suggests that in deaf signers exposed to signed language before age five, the mirror mechanism has minimal involvement during the perception of…

Social abilities relate to performance on visual-spatial perspective-taking (VSPT) tasks for hearing nonsigners but may relate differently to VSPT abilities for deaf signers because of their distinct linguistic and social experiences. This research investigated whether deaf adults approach VSPT tasks nonsocially (as previously suggested for deaf…

Studies examining visuospatial working memory (WM) in individuals with congenital deafness have yielded inconsistent results, and tactile WM has rarely been examined. The current study examined WM span tasks in the two modalities among 20 individuals with congenital deafness and 20 participants with typical hearing. The congenital deafness group…

Purpose: The use of sign-supported speech (SSS) in the education of deaf students has been recently discussed in relation to its usefulness with deaf children using cochlear implants. To clarify the benefits of SSS for comprehension, 2 eye-tracking experiments aimed to detect the extent to which signs are actively processed in this mode of…

To talk about space, spoken languages rely on arbitrary and categorical forms (e.g., left, right). In sign languages, however, the visual-spatial modality allows for iconic encodings (motivated form-meaning mappings) of space in which form and location of the hands bear resemblance to the objects and spatial relations depicted. We assessed whether…

Sensorimotor integration is an unconscious process of the brain incorporating multiple senses and movement. This review aimed to synthesize the literature on the role of visual-motor integration in language learning, whether spoken or signed, for deaf and hard of hearing (D/HH) children. Nineteen peer-reviewed studies published between 1980 and…

It is yet unclear whether congenitally deaf cochlear implant (CD CI) users' visual and multisensory emotion perception is influenced by their history in sign language acquisition. We hypothesized that early-signing CD CI users, relative to late-signing CD CI users and hearing, non-signing controls, show better facial expression recognition and…

The infant brain may be predisposed to identify perceptually salient cues that are common to both signed and spoken languages. Recent theory based on spoken languages has advanced sonority as one of these potential language acquisition cues. Using a preferential looking paradigm with an infrared eye tracker, we explored visual attention of hearing…

What supports deaf signers advantage over nonsigners on visuospatial short-term memory (STM) tasks is still a matter of debate. We compared the performance of 18 deaf Italian Sign Language (LIS) users with that of a matched group of Italian hearing nonsigners in three different tasks: two versions of the Corsi Block test, namely span forward and…

Purpose: Phonological activation during visual word recognition was studied in deaf and hearing children under two circumstances: (a) when the use of phonology was not required for task performance and might even hinder it and (b) when the use of phonology was critical for task performance. Method: Deaf children mastering written Dutch and Sign…

We present the results of an experiment on lexical recognition of human sign language signs in which the available perceptual information about handshape and hand orientation was manipulated. Stimuli were videos of signs from Sign Language of the Netherlands (SLN). The videos were processed to create four conditions: (1) one in which neither…

Lexical access is concerned with how the spoken or visual input of language is projected onto the mental representations of lexical forms. To date, most theories of lexical access have been based almost exclusively on studies of spoken languages and/or orthographic representations of spoken languages. Relatively few studies have examined how…

Studies have reported a right visual field (RVF) advantage for coherent motion detection by deaf and hearing signers but not non-signers. Yet two studies [Bosworth R. G., & Dobkins, K. R. (2002). Visual field asymmetries for motion processing in deaf and hearing signers. "Brain and Cognition," 49, 170-181; Samar, V. J., & Parasnis, I. (2005).…