This pilot study explored effects of hearing loss on deaf children's reading comprehension in an online context. Eighteen deaf secondary students, ages 12-14 years (11 with British Sign Language as their dominant language, seven with English as their dominant language) engaged in an online research comprehension task. Six age-matched hearing…

Temporal and causal information in text are crucial in helping the reader form a coherent representation of a narrative. Deaf novice readers are generally poor at processing linguistic markers of causal/temporal information (i.e., connectives), but what is unclear is whether this is indicative of a more general deficit in reasoning about…

Thirty-three young people with cochlear implants, aged between 9 and 16 years, were assessed for use of their implant system, cognitive abilities, vocabulary, reading, and writing skills. The group came from throughout England and included 26 born deaf, six deafened by meningitis, one with auditory neuropathy, and five with additional needs.…

A total of 79 profoundly deaf 8- to 12-year-old children were tested for comprehension of spoken, written, and signed (Paget-Gorman Sign System, PGSS) English grammatical contrasts. It is concluded that the PGSS provides a communication channel that does not hinder language acquisition, but does not overcome the grammatical problems of deaf…

Nine children suffering from Landau-Kleffner (L-K) syndrome and 25 children with developmental expressive disorders were tested for comprehension of English grammatical structures in spoken, written, and signed language modalities. L-K children demonstrated comprehension problems in all three language modalities and tended to treat language as…