I have been asked to contribute this guest editorial to provide further perspective on the health care experience of elderly deaf patients reported in the article by Witte and Kuzel in this issue. l Accordingly, this editorial explores the availability and problems of medical care for the elderly Deaf in Richmond, Va, area as well as comments on health care delivery to the Deaf population at la...

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 hemisphere advantage for motion processing, while...

Parasnis is an associate professor in the department of Applied Language and Cognition Research at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY. Her primary research interests are in visual cognition, bilingualismbiculturalism, and deaf education. The perspective that deaf people' should be regarded primarily as a cultural and language minority...

The study of congenitally deaf adult humans provides an opportunity to examine neuroanatomical plasticity resulting from altered sensory experience. However, attributing the source of the brain's structural variance in the deaf is complicated by the fact that deaf individuals also differ in their language experiences (e.g., sign vs spoken), which likely influence brain anatomy independently. Al...

THISARTICLE GIVES AN OVERVIEW of past and present library services to, and policies about, deaf people. The unique properties of the deaf community are discussed. Recent developments in deaf studies, library services for deaf people, and laws affecting library services to deaf people are discussed. The roles librarians and libraries can play in providing library services to, and developing poli...

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...

Sensory areas of the cerebral cortex integrate the sensory inputs with the ongoing activity. We studied how complete absence of auditory experience affects this process in a higher mammal model of complete sensory deprivation, the congenitally deaf cat. Cortical responses were elicited by intracochlear electric stimulation using cochlear implants in adult hearing controls and deaf cats. Additio...

Possession of a "theory of mind" (ToM)--as demonstrated by an understanding of the false beliefs of others--is fundamental in children's cognitive development. A key question for debate concerns the effect of language input on ToM. In this respect, comparisons of deaf native-signing children who are raised by deaf signing parents with deaf late-signing children who are raised by hearing parents...

Most deaf children and adults struggle to read, but some deaf individuals do become highly proficient readers. There is disagreement about the specific causes of reading difficulty in the deaf population, and consequently, disagreement about the effectiveness of different strategies for teaching reading to deaf children. Much of the disagreement surrounds the question of whether deaf children r...

This ethnographic study explores the identity development of 9 deaf participants through the narratives of their educational experiences in either mainstream or special schools for the Deaf. This exploration goes beyond a binary conceptualization of deaf identity that allows for only the medical and social models and proposes a bicultural "dialogue model." This postmodern theoretical framework ...