Infants' language exposure largely involves face-to-face interactions providing acoustic and visual speech cues but also social cues that might foster language learning. Yet, both audiovisual speech information and social information have so far received little attention in research on infants' early language development. Using a preferential…

Background: Only a small number of longitudinal studies have been conducted to assess the literacy skills of children with hearing impairment. The results of these studies are inconsistent with regard to the importance of phonology in reading acquisition as is the case in studies with hearing children. Colin, Magnan, Ecalle, and Leybaert (2007)…

The authors conducted an integrative review of the research literature on the writing development, writing instruction, and writing assessment of young deaf children ages 3 to 8 years (or preschool through third grade) published between 1990 and 2012. A total of 17 studies were identified that met inclusion criteria. The analysis examined research…

The article challenges educators to rethink reading instruction practices for students who are deaf or hard of hearing. The authors begin with a discussion of the role of phonology in reading, then summarize the evidence of phonological coding among skilled deaf readers and investigate alternative routes for acquiring phonologically related skills…

Two experiments, one with congenitally deaf and one with hearing individuals, investigated memory for serial order via Cued Speech (CS). Deaf individuals, but not hearing individuals experienced with CS, appeared to use the phonology of CS to support their recall. The recency effect was greater for hearing individuals provided with sound than for…

A study compared the rhyme-generation ability of 20 college students with severe to profound deafness from cued speech (CS) and non-cued speech (NCS) backgrounds with 10 controls for consistent orthography-to-phonology (O-P) rhyming elements and inconsistent O-P. Participants from CS backgrounds did not differ significantly from the hearing…

Background: The aim of the present study was twofold: 1) to determine whether phonological skills measured in deaf prereaders predict their later phonological and reading skills after one year of reading instruction as is the case for hearing children; 2) to examine whether the age of exposure to a fully specified phonological input such as Cued…

Deaf children exposed to Cued Speech (CS), either before age two (early) or later at school (late), were presented with pseudowords with and without CS. The main goal was to establish the way in which lipreading and CS combine to produce unitary percepts, similar to audiovisual integration in speech perception, when participants are presented with…

Compared spelling performance of hearing and deaf 6- to 14- year-olds on high- and low-frequency words. Found that most spelling productions of hearing children and deaf children with early intensive home cued speech (CS) exposure were phonologically accurate for both types of words. Deaf children with later CS exposure at school had lower…

A child with chronic otitis media with effusion solved the problem of reduced and fluctuating auditory input with phonological selection and avoidance strategies that capitalized on prosodic cues. Findings illustrate the need to consider interactions among performance, input, and linguistic constraints to explain individual variation in language…