Lexical comprehension and production is directly evaluated for the first time in deaf signing children below the age of 3 years. A Picture Naming Task was administered to 8 deaf signing toddlers (aged 2-3 years) who were exposed to Sign Language since birth. Results were compared with data of hearing speaking controls. In both deaf and hearing children, comprehension was significantly higher th...

Cochlear implants have been an effective intervention for many profoundly deaf adults and children. Specifically, in prelingually deaf children, cochlear implants provide the first exposure to both environmental sounds and spoken language. After gaining access to sound and spoken language, many children using cochlear implants have been found to develop language with a developmental trajectory ...

The emerging reading and spelling abilities of 24 deaf and 23 hearing beginning readers were followed over 2 years. The deaf children varied in their language backgrounds and preferred mode of communication. All children were given a range of literacy, cognitive and language-based tasks every 12 months. Deaf and hearing children made similar progress in literacy in the beginning stages of readi...

Do children come to the language-learning situation with a predetermined set of ideas about motion events that they want to communicate? If so, is the expression of these ideas modified by exposure to a language model within a particular cultural context? We explored these questions by comparing the gestures produced by Chinese and American deaf children who had not been exposed to a usable con...

Children with hearing impairment have deficits of balance and motors. Although most of parents teach deaf children communication skills in early life, but rarely teach the deficits of balance. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether static balance improved after table tennis training. Table tennis training was provided four times a week for eight weeks to two 12-year-old deaf child...

This paper describes the development of a new Test of Child Speechreading (ToCS) that was specifically designed to be suitable for use with deaf children. Speechreading is a skill which is required for deaf children to access the language of the hearing community. ToCS is a child-friendly, computer-based, speechreading test that measures speechreading (silent lipreading) at three psycholinguist...

BACKGROUND Deafness has an adverse impact on children's ability to acquire spoken languages. Signed languages offer a more accessible input for deaf children, but because the vast majority are born to hearing parents who do not sign, their early exposure to sign language is limited. Deaf children as a whole are therefore at high risk of language delays. AIMS We compared deaf and hearing child...