There is great variability in the ways in which the speech intelligibility of d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children who use spoken language as part, or all, of their communication system is measured. This systematic review examined the measures and methods that have been used when examining the speech intelligibility of children who are DHH…

Easy access to the internet allows adolescents to share humor, such as memes, via social media. This quasi-experimental study investigated whether there was a difference in the number of memes comprehended on an assessment test among adolescents who were typically developing, adolescents who were deaf or hard of hearing, and adolescents with…

Purpose: This study investigated irony comprehension by Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants, focusing on how prosodic and visual cues contribute to their comprehension, and whether second-order Theory of Mind is required for using these cues. Method: We tested 52 Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (aged 3-7 years) and…

Face masks have become common protective measures in community and workplace environments to help reduce the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection. Face masks can make it difficult to hear and understand speech, particularly for people with hearing loss. An aim of our cross-sectional survey was to…

Purpose: This study aimed to evaluate the effect of speech recognition performance, working memory capacity (WMC), and a noise reduction algorithm (NRA) on listening effort as measured with pupillometry in cochlear implant (CI) users while listening to speech in noise. Method: Speech recognition and pupil responses (peak dilation, peak latency,…

Professionals in the authors' setting -- The Children's Center for Communication/Beverly School for the Deaf (CCCBSD) -- embed foundational language comprehension strategies within language-rich environments. This occurs in traditional classrooms as well as in a variety of other settings, such as therapeutic services, programs in related arts…

Past work investigating spatial cognition suggests better mental rotation abilities for those who are fluent in a signed language. However, no prior work has assessed whether fluency is needed to achieve this performance benefit or what it may look like on the neurobiological level. We conducted an electroencephalography experiment and assessed…

Our study compares the intelligibility of French-speaking children with a cochlear implant (N = 13) and age-matched children with typical hearing (N = 13) in a narrative task. This contrasts with previous studies in which speech intelligibility of children with cochlear implants is most often tested using repetition or reading tasks. Languages…

Limited language experience in childhood is common among deaf individuals, which prior research has shown to lead to low levels of language processing. Although basic structures such as word order have been found to be resilient to conditions of sparse language input in early life, whether they are robust to conditions of extreme language delay is…

Fatigue is often defined as a mood state, a subjective feeling of tiredness or exhaustion that reduces our desire to continue working on a task (Bess et al., 2020; Hockey, 2013). Fatigue is ubiquitous, something most adults and children experience when struggling to complete a long or challenging task. Most of the time, all that is needed to…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to assess the listening behavior and social engagement of cochlear implant (CI) users and normal-hearing (NH) adults in daily life and relate these actions to objective hearing outcomes. Method: Ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) collected using a smartphone app were used to probe patterns of listening…

As spatial languages, sign languages rely on spatial cognitive processes that are not involved for spoken languages. Interlocutors have different visual perspectives of the signer's hands requiring a mental transformation for successful communication about spatial scenes. It is unknown whether visual-spatial perspective-taking (VSPT) or mental…

Purpose: The use of sign-supported speech (SSS) in the education of deaf students has been recently discussed in relation to its usefulness with deaf children using cochlear implants. To clarify the benefits of SSS for comprehension, 2 eye-tracking experiments aimed to detect the extent to which signs are actively processed in this mode of…

The auditory scaffolding hypothesis states that early experience with sound underpins the development of domain-general sequence processing abilities, supported by studies observing impaired sequence processing in deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) children. To test this hypothesis, we administered a sequence processing task to 77 DHH children who use…

Purpose: Parenting stress has been studied as a potential predictor of developmental outcomes in children with normal hearing and children who are deaf and hard of hearing. However, it is unclear how parenting stress might underlie at-risk spoken language and neurocognitive outcomes in this clinical pediatric population. We investigated parenting…