Deaf and hearing children: a comparison of peripheral vision development

A cochlear implant (CI) is a hearing device introduced in the 1980s for profoundly deaf subjects who gained little or no benefit from powerful hearing aids. This device comprises an electrode array inserted in the cochlea, connected to an internal receiver, and an externally worn speech processor. The CI transforms acoustic signals into electrical currents which directly stimulate the auditory nerve. Since the early 1990s, cochlear implantation in children has been developing rapidly. Although it is still difficult to predict how a child will perform with a cochlear implant, the success of cochlear implantation can no longer be denied. In this paper, some recent papers and reports, and the results of the various Nijmegen cochlear implant studies, are reviewed. Issues about selection, examinations, surgery and the outcome are discussed. Overall, our results were comparable with those of other authors. It can be concluded that cochlear implantation is an effective treatment for postlingually deaf as well as prelingually (congenital or acquired) deaf children with profound bilateral sensorineural deafness.

Semantic categorization: A comparison between deaf and hearing children

The relative contributions of phonological awareness and vocabulary knowledge to deaf and hearing children’s reading fluency in Chinese

This paper reports the results of three tasks comparing the development of the understanding of facial expressions of emotion in deaf and hearing children. Two groups of hearing and deaf children of elementary school age were tested for their ability to match photographs of facial expressions of emotion, and to produce and comprehend emotion labels for the expressions of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise. Accuracy data showed comparable levels of performance for deaf and hearing children of the same age. Happiness and sadness were the most accurately matched expressions and the most accurately produced and comprehended labels. Anger was the least accurately matched expression and the most poorly comprehended emotion label. Disgust was the least accurately labeled expression; however, deaf children were more accurate at labeling this expression, and also at labeling fear, than hearing children. Error data revealed that children confused anger with disgust, and fear with surprise. However, the younger groups of deaf and hearing children also showed a tendency to confuse the negative expressions of anger, disgust, and fear with sadness. The results suggest that, despite possible differences in the early socialisation of emotion, deaf and hearing children share a common understanding of the emotions conveyed by distinctive facial expressions.

There is limited research comparing the presentation of autism in deaf and hearing children and young people. These comparisons are important to facilitate accurate diagnosis, as rates of misdiagnosis and delay in diagnosis amongst deaf children and young people are high. The aim of this study was to compare diagnostic assessment profiles of a UK cohort of autistic deaf and hearing children and young people. The Autism Diagnostic Interview—Revised—Deaf adaptation was completed with the parents of 106 children and young people (deaf children = 65; hearing children = 41). The majority of items explored showed no significant differences between deaf and hearing children and young people. Differences were found in peer relationships, where autistic deaf participants were less likely to respond to the approaches of other children or play imaginatively with peers. These findings need to be taken into consideration by clinicians in the assessment process.

Perspectives on academic and social aspects of children’s school experiences were obtained from deaf and hearing children and their (deaf or hearing) parents. Possible differences between (1) the views of children and their parents and (2) those of hearing children and their parents compared to deaf children and their parents were of particular interest. Overall, parents gave their children higher school friendship ratings than the children gave themselves, and hearing children and their parents were more positive about children’s friendships than were deaf children and their parents. Both children and parents also saw deaf children as less successful in reading than hearing children. However, deaf children having deaf parents, attending a school for the deaf and using sign language at home all were associated with more positive perceptions of social success. Use of cochlear implants was not associated with perceptions of greater academic or social success. These and related findings are discussed in the context of parent and child perspectives on social and academic functioning and particular challenges confronted by deaf children in regular school settings.

BackgroundDeafness 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.AimsWe compared deaf and hearing children's performance on a semantic fluency task. Optimal performance on this task requires a systematic search of the mental lexicon, the retrieval of words within a subcategory and, when that subcategory is exhausted, switching to a new subcategory. We compared retrieval patterns between groups, and also compared the responses of deaf children who used British Sign Language (BSL) with those who used spoken English. We investigated how semantic fluency performance related to children's expressive vocabulary and executive function skills, and also retested semantic fluency in the majority of the children nearly 2 years later, in order to investigate how much progress they had made in that time.Methods & ProceduresParticipants were deaf children aged 6–11 years (N = 106, comprising 69 users of spoken English, 29 users of BSL and eight users of Sign Supported English—SSE) compared with hearing children (N = 120) of the same age who used spoken English. Semantic fluency was tested for the category ‘animals’. We coded for errors, clusters (e.g., ‘pets’, ‘farm animals’) and switches. Participants also completed the Expressive One‐Word Picture Vocabulary Test and a battery of six non‐verbal executive function tasks. In addition, we collected follow‐up semantic fluency data for 70 deaf and 74 hearing children, nearly 2 years after they were first tested.Outcomes & ResultsDeaf children, whether using spoken or signed language, produced fewer items in the semantic fluency task than hearing children, but they showed similar patterns of responses for items most commonly produced, clustering of items into subcategories and switching between subcategories. Both vocabulary and executive function scores predicted the number of correct items produced. Follow‐up data from deaf participants showed continuing delays relative to hearing children 2 years later.Conclusions & ImplicationsWe conclude that semantic fluency can be used experimentally to investigate lexical organization in deaf children, and that it potentially has clinical utility across the heterogeneous deaf population. We present normative data to aid clinicians who wish to use this task with deaf children.

There is a long history of investigations reporting that deaf children lag behind hearing peers in learning, problem solving, and creativity. In this chapter we describe the kinds of evidence that led to such conclusions and the extent to which they appear to be valid today. Early research concerning cognitive development in deaf children often was aimed at understanding intellectual growth “in the absence of language.” Other investigations involved tasks that required comprehension of English or histories of reading. More recently, we have come to understand that both kinds of evaluation might be biased against deaf children. Still, ways in which deaf children’s atypical histories of language functioning and educational experience might influence their cognitive development are largely unexplored. There have been a variety of studies dealing with deaf children’s cognitive skills, and especially memory, sometimes including consideration of language fluencies and degree of hearing loss. More recently, various tests of cognitive ability have been developed that are nonverbal in nature or can be administered through sign language. The extent to which those tests accurately reflect the thinking skills of deaf children still remains poorly understood, as does the question of whether such tests tap the same skills that they do in hearing children. Further, some people still make the appealing but dubious assumption that cognitive development is essentially the same for deaf and hearing children (see Braden, 2001; Marschark & Lukomski, 2001, for discussion). Studies of intelligence and academic abilities of minority and underprivileged children during the 1960s and 1970s led to a concern about the lack of cultural fairness in testing. It was recognized at the time that the nature of children’s early environments could influence later performance on intelligence measures and academic achievement. This issue was never adequately addressed with regard to deaf children, most of whom clearly have early childhood experiences that could cause differences in test performance. As a result, deaf children were often described as “deficient” or as “concrete, literal thinkers” who were unlikely to be able to grasp the kinds of abstract concepts necessary for academic success.

Writing is an integral part of linguistic education of deaf persons which, due to the lack of auditorysensors, has an insurmountable difficulty achieving, so this shortcoming is directly reflected in the general literacyof deaf children. Many detailed studies in the world suggest that in order to become literate, a deaf child must learnthe language of the community. Je/she must first learn the letters and learn to write. About 50% of young deafpeople after high school read and write worse than a ten-year-old hearing child. The aim of this research is toexamine the usage, reading, writing, and comprehension in deaf children of the adverbial clause of place in writtenform and to determine the statistical significance of differences between deaf and hearing children. The study wasconducted on a sample of 140 respondents. The first subsample of subjects, the experimental group consisted of 70deaf students, and the second subsample, a control group of 70 hearing students, of the same chronological age. Themeasurement instrument “Test of writing, and comprehension of an adverbial clause of place” was applied. Thefrequencies and percentages of respondents' responses to the variables were calculated. The F (Fisher) test was usedto determine the statistical significance of the differences between deaf and hearing subjects. The results showed that1.40 % of deaf children are completely successful in reading and writing priloske odredbe, and thaat 90 % of deafchildren use prislocke odredbe partially successfully. The percentage of children that do not use priloske odredbe inany form in their written communication is 8.60%. The order of use of adverbial clause of place by frequency is asfollows: "in", "on", "below", "behind", "next to", and "between". The largest number of deaf children use theadverbial clause of place "in" in their written expression, 65.70% of them. Then, the adverbial clause of place "on"51.14%, the adverbial clause of place "below" 47.14%, the adverbial clause of place "behind" 31.43%, the adverbialclause of place "beside" 30%, and the adverbial clause of place "between" 22.85%.There is a statistically significant difference between deaf and hearing children in the use of the adverbial clause ofplace at the level of statistical significance of p=0.000.

Comprehension and retention of stories read by hearing children and by orally trained, congenitally, profoundly deaf children were studied. One normal and two experimentally confused stories were read by both groups, and recall was tested immediately after reading and following a week's delay. One experimentally confused story contained nonphonetic misspellings and was expected to cause difficulty for hearing readers; the other contained confused anaphoric references and was expected to cause difficulty for deaf readers. Amount recalled did not differ between the hearing and deaf groups on the normal story, but the deaf children were superior in amount recalled for both confused stories. However, the deaf children made significantly more distortions in their recall than did the hearing children. Orally trained deaf children may transfer the broad reconstructive strategies used for lip-reading purposes to reading style and thus engage in more guessing and reconstructive activity during reading than do hearing readers.

Groups of deaf and hearing children who had not fully mastered the rules for the assignment of the subject of the dependent verb for sentences of the form: Noun Phrase 1 (NP1) + Illocutionary Verb + Noun Phrase 2 (NP2) + to + Infinitive Verb were tested for the influence of four kinds of plausibility cues. In three sets the social power relations holding between the occupants of the respective NP's were used to construct plausible, neutral and implausible frames as judged by the tendency to construe NP2 as the subject of the dependent verb. In the fourth, implausible verb (IV), the dependent verb referred to an action difficult for others to control, and so was neutral for regular illocutionary verbs requiring NP2 as subject, but positive for NP1 construals appropriate to the irregular illocutionaly verb, promise. The hearing children proved sensitive to the plausibility cues, showing much larger differences in success with the regular and exceptional verb for the plausible than for the implausible set, with the neutral and IV sets occupying intervening positions. Deaf children did not respond to the plausibility variable. It was concluded that although it had been demonstrated that the referential meaning of individual words can influence the construal of meaning of word combinations, the strategy might not be successful with the deaf unless preceded by further training in the denotative and connotative meanings of individual words.

Children, from birth, acquire literacy within various contexts, including in early childhood educational settings. In the United States, there has been renewed attention from the public, the government and educators to increase the quality of early childhood education. Particular focus has been on settings serving children who are at risk for of later literacy failure. This can include deaf children who typically fall well behind their hearing peers in literacy during the school years and beyond. However, little is known about the frequency and types of literacy experiences offered to deaf children as compared to those offered to hearing children. The current investigation aimed to account for the literacy activities and materials provided to hearing and deaf children through a survey of early childhood educators ( N = 155) who work primarily with one of these populations. Descriptive statistics and Chi-Square Tests of Independence comparisons indicated that, although there is room for improvement in both populations, deaf children in particular may not be receiving access to high quality literacy activities in EC settings. Based on the study’s findings, directions for future research and also the preparation and continued development of all early childhood educators are identified.

We examined deaf and hearing children's progression of steps in theory of mind (ToM) development including their understanding of social pretending. Ninety-three children (33 deaf; 60 hearing) aged 3-13 years were tested on a set of six closely matched ToM tasks. Results showed that deaf children were delayed substantially behind hearing children in understanding pretending, false belief (FB) and other ToM concepts, in line with their delayed uptake of social pretend (SP) play. By using a scaling methodology, we confirmed previous evidence of a consistent five-step developmental progression for both groups. Moreover, by including social pretence understanding, both deaf and hearing children's ToM sequences were shown to extend reliably to six sequential developmental steps. Finally and focally, even though both groups' sequences were six steps long, the placement of pretence relative to other ToM milestones varied with hearing status. Deaf children understood social pretending at an earlier step in the ToM sequence than hearing children, albeit at a later chronological age. Theoretically, the findings are relevant to questions about how universal developmental progressions come together along with culturally distinctive inputs and biological factors (such as hearing loss) to set the pace for ToM development.

Successful communication with profoundly deaf children is heavily dependent on visual attention. Previous research has shown that mothers of deaf children--notably those who are deaf themselves--use a variety of strategies to gain their children's attention. This study compares patterns of visual attention in deaf and hearing children to determine how they are affected by the absence of auditory cues, especially when looking to the mother's face. The visual attention of 18-month-old infants to their mothers was examined in two groups of deaf children (6 with deaf mothers and 6 with hearing mothers) and two of hearing children (6 with deaf mothers and 8 with hearing mothers). Dyads were observed in free play and 10 minutes of videorecorded interaction was analysed. All looks to the mother were classified as Spontaneous, Responsive (Child turns in response to something done by mother) or Elicited (Mother actively seeks to gain child's attention by, e.g., tapping or waving). The kind of event that attracted the child's attention in Responsive and Elicited episodes was also determined (e.g., object movement, speech, physical contact), as was the focus of the child's attention (e.g., mother's face, mother's body). Responsive looks to the mother were the most frequent for all groups but on only about 25% of occasions were they directed to her face. Elicited and spontaneous looks occurred less often but were frequently directed to the mother's face. Spontaneous looking occurred in all groups but elicited looking very seldom occurred in Hearing-Hearing dyads. Overall, there were fewer looks to the mother in the two groups where mother and child had congruent hearing status, although the proportion of the looks to the mother's face was similar. Both spontaneous and elicited looks are likely to involve attention to the mother's face. However, while active elicitation of attention is an important part of successful communication with young deaf children, this does not appear necessary for typically developing hearing children who turn to look at their mother's face on hearing her voice. The implications of these findings for differences in the dynamics of communication with young deaf and hearing children are discussed.

Some authors have tried to explain the relatively frequent behavioural problems in deaf children by an impaired theory of mind development: a poor appraisal of other people's beliefs and desires. Recent studies suggest that this explanation is too simplistic. When deaf children were asked to explain other people's emotional reactions, Rieffe and Meerum Terwogt (2000) found that they were no worse at giving mental state references than hearing controls. However, the content of these references differed between the two groups: deaf children made more desire attributions and fewer belief attributions than the hearing children. It is important to note that desires are strongly linked with the outcome of a situation, whereas beliefs are often necessary to understand the process that preceded this outcome. A follow-up study showed, as expected, that when both groups were offered stories about disappointing situations, deaf children reacted primarily with outcome-dependent emotions and explained these emotions accordingly. Their neglect of the preceding process implied also a neglect for the causal factors, unlike their hearing peers, who frequently referred to process-relevant elements. Nearly all deaf children in these studies had hearing parents. It is known that the conversations between hearing parents and their deaf children are impaired due to a language gap: parents often fail to explain their decisions and they only communicate the eventual outcome. Their deaf children seem to react in a similar way: they limit their focus and communication to their own wishes. If this type of communication pattern becomes common practice, one can easily see why deaf children are frequently labelled as stubborn and obstinate. In time, as we showed in another study, our deaf participants even failed to reproduce the reasons for an undesirable decision that was explicitly explained to them. Inadequate communication, delayed emotional competence and low self-esteem (by losing their grasp on the situation) form a dangerous triad that could easily have long-term effects.