Children all over the world successfully acquire two or more languages with appropriate input. Children who are born with typical hearing into households where a sign language is the home language (because one or both parents are Deaf signers; these children are known as Kodas) are no different – they can successfully acquire both a spoken language and a sign language and become bimodal bilingu...

There are at least two languages (American Sign Language [ASL], English) and three modalities (sign, speech, print) in most deaf individuals' lives. Mixing of ASL and English in utterances of deaf adults has been described in various ways (pidgins, diglossia, language contact, bilingualism), but children's mixing usually is treated as the 'fault' of poor input language. Alternatively, how might...

This study examined the impact and predictive ability of parental personality and perceived stress on behavior problems of their deaf child. One hundred and fourteen parents with a deaf child completed measures of personality, parenting stress, and child behavioral functioning. Higher parental neuroticism, which reflects a susceptibility to emotional and psychological distress, significantly pr...

Hearing children 4, 6, and 8 years of age and deaf children 6 to 10 years of age who communicated orally (speech only) or bimodally (speech plus sign) participated in two receptive communication tasks. In Task 1, their mothers described, orally or bimodally, a designated picture from a set of four pictures so that the child could identify the intended referent from the four alternatives. In Tas...

The spellings of 39 profoundly deaf users of cochlear implants, aged 6–12 years, were compared with those of 39 hearing peers. When controlled for age and reading ability, the error rates of the 2 groups were not significantly different. Both groups evinced phonological spelling strategies, performing better on words with more typical sound–spelling correspondences and often making misspellings...

It is a sad commentary on the education of children with hearing deficiencies that after more than two and one-half centuries of organized effort educators still worship at the altars of separate methods, when no one method is sufficient to meet all the needs of a single deaf child, much less the needs of all deaf children. I am using the term "deaf" to mean persons with a prelingual PTA thresh...

This study aimed to explore the recognition of emotional and non-emotional biological movements in children with severe and profound deafness. 24 deaf children, together with 24 control children matched on mental age and 24 control children matched on chronological age, were asked to identify a person’s actions, subjective states, emotions, and objects conveyed by moving point-light displays. R...

PURPOSE To explore the phonological awareness skills of deaf children with cochlear implants (CIs) and relationships with vocabulary and reading development. METHOD Forty-three deaf children with implants who were between 5 and 15 years of age were tested; 21 had been implanted at around 2.5 years of age (Early CI group), and 22 had been implanted at around 5 years of age (Late CI group). Two...

This article will provide information about the Pragmatics Checklist, which consists of 45 items and is scored as: (1) not present, (2) present but preverbal, (3) present with one to three words, and (4) present with complex language. Information for both children who are deaf or hard of hearing and those with normal hearing are presented. Children who are deaf or hard of hearing are significan...