Experience with a visual-spatial language may influence certain cognitive processes (Keehner and Gathercole 2007). Spatial ability is an important cognitive skill (Linn and Petersen 1985). Some research has found that deaf signers outperform hearing nonsigners on certain spatial tasks (e.g., Emmorey, Kosslyn, and Bellugi 1993) and that hearing…

Being connected to other people at the level of inner and unobservable mental states is one of the most essential aspects of a meaningful life, including psychological well-being and successful cooperation. The foundation for this kind of connectedness is our theory of mind (ToM), that is the ability to understand our own and others' inner…

This study investigated visual statistical learning (VSL) in 24 deaf signers and 24 hearing non-signers. Previous research with hearing individuals suggests that SL mechanisms support literacy. Our first goal was to assess whether VSL was associated with reading ability in deaf individuals, and whether this relation was sustained by a link between…

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…

This article reports on an investigation of graphophonological processes in deaf readers of French over a 1-year period. Deaf readers are known to have a phonological deficit compared to hearing peers, and conclusions from studies on this question are often conflicting. Among the different types of phonological processing, we can identify…

In recent years, a strong functional relationship between finger counting and number processing has been suggested. Developmental studies have shown specific effects of the structure of the individual finger counting system on arithmetic abilities. Moreover, the orientation of the mental quantity representation ("number line") seems to be…

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…

Many deaf children and adults show lags in mathematical abilities. The current study examines the basic number representations that allow individuals to perform higher-level arithmetical procedures. These representations are normally present in the earliest stages of development, but they may be affected by cultural, developmental, and educational…

Studied 18 deaf and 18 hearing childrens' (aged 6.8 to 16.6 years) performance on short-term memory tasks involving production of action responses to previously paired visual stimuli. Deaf children showed superior performance on the simultaneous presentation-free recall task and inferior performance on the serial presentation-serial recall task.…