Parental Involvement in Deaf Children's Education Programs as a Predictor of Child's Language, Early Reading, and Social-Emotional Development

This study examined the impact of school-based, teacher-rated parental involvement on four child outcomes: language development, early reading skills, and positive and negative measures of social-emotional development. The 28 children were assessed for outcomes between 9 to 53 months post-graduation from a birth-to-3 early intervention (EI) program for children with hearing loss. Other factors included in the study were child's hearing loss, mother's education level, mother's current communication skills with her child, and maternal use of additional services beyond those offered by the early intervention program or the child's school program. Parental involvement in children's school-based education program is a significant positive predictor to early reading skills but shares considerable variance with maternal communication skill for this outcome. In this study, maternal communication skills and the child's hearing loss were the strongest predictors for language development. Maternal use of additional services was the strongest predictor to poorer social-emotional adjustment. The study's findings indicate that although parental involvement in their deaf child's school-based education program can positively contribute to academic performance, parental communication skill is a more significant predictor for positive language and academic development. Factors associated with parental involvement, maternal communication, and use of additional services are explored and suggestions are offered to enhance parental involvement and communication skills.     

The role of educators of the deaf in the early identification of hearing loss

About 16,000 babies each year will be identified with hearing loss by age 3 months once universal newborn hearing screening becomes a reality. Identification of hearing loss in infancy, followed by appropriate intervention by age 6 months, can result in normal language development, regardless of degree of hearing loss. As the average age of identification of hearing loss moves downward toward 2 months, children with hearing loss will enter the educational system earlier and with language skills commensurate with those of their hearing peers. In order to provide appropriate services to children with hearing loss and their families, early interventionists will need to forge links to health care providers involved in universal newborn hearing screening programs, to have specialized training in deafness and hearing loss, and to have expertise in providing services to very young children and to children with hearing loss in the broad range from mild to profound.     

Impact of early intervention on expressive and receptive language development among young children with permanent hearing loss

Along with early detection, early intervention (EI) is critical for children identified with hearing loss. Evidence indicates that many children with sensorineural hearing loss experience improved language abilities if EI services were initiated at an "early" age. The present study's objectives were to determine the impact of a state EI program on language over time of children with permanent hearing loss and evaluate the association of EI enrollment by age 6 months with early language skill development. Young children in a state EI program were included in this longitudinal study. Results indicate that children enrolled prior to age 6 months were more likely to have age-appropriate language skills at baseline than children enrolled at or after 6 months, and maintained age-appropriate skills over time. Children enrolled at or after 6 months had lower baseline skills but made significant language progress, irrespective of hearing loss severity.     

Not Yet Identified: The knowledge,skills, and training needs of early years professionals in relation to children's speech and language development

This article draws on a research project, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, looking at early years professionals' knowledge about speech and language development and their confidence and skills in assessing normal and delayed language development. Key findings, based on 829 questionnaires and 50 interviews, reveal very limited training in speech and language difficulties as part of initial training and low levels of post-qualification training in children's speech and language. Practitioners are aware of the need for early identification of children's communication difficulties but lack the tools with which to perform this identification. In order to provide a context for these results, a content analysis of the curricula from a variety of initial training routes explored the extent to which there was a focus explicitly on assessment and identification of children with speech and language difficulties. The role of professional journals and key texts in supporting practitioners in making judgements about children's language development was also investigated. The access to, and provision of, post-qualification training to support the assessment process is identified as a key area for development.     

Spoken language development in oral preschool children with permanent childhood deafness

This article documented spoken language outcomes for preschool children with hearing loss and examined the relationships between language abilities and characteristics of children such as degree of hearing loss, cognitive abilities, age at entry to early intervention, and parent involvement in children's intervention programs. Participants were evaluated using a combination of the Child Development Inventory, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, and the Preschool Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals depending on their age at the time of assessment. Maternal education, cognitive ability, and family involvement were also measured. Over half of the children who participated in this study had poor language outcomes overall. No significant differences were found in language outcomes on any of the measures for children who were diagnosed early and those diagnosed later. Multiple regression analyses showed that family participation, degree of hearing loss, and cognitive ability significantly predicted language outcomes and together accounted for almost 60% of the variance in scores. This article highlights the importance of family participation in intervention programs to enable children to achieve optimal language outcomes. Further work may clarify the effects of early diagnosis on language outcomes for preschool children.     

Effects of cochlear implants on children's reading and academic achievement

This article presents a critical analysis of empirical studies assessing literacy and other domains of academic achievement among children with cochlear implants. A variety of recent studies have demonstrated benefits to hearing, language, and speech from implants, leading to assumptions that early implantation and longer periods of implant should be associated with higher reading and academic achievement. This review, however, reveals that although there are clear benefits of cochlear implantation to achievement in young deaf children, empirical results have been somewhat variable. Examination of the literature with regard to reading achievement suggests that the lack of consistent findings might be the result of frequent failures to control potentially confounding variables such as age of implantation, language skills prior to implantation, reading ability prior to implantation, and consistency of implant use. Studies of academic achievement beyond reading are relatively rare, and the extent to which performance in such domains is mediated by reading abilities or directly influenced by hearing, language, and speech remains unclear. Considerations of methodological shortcomings in existing research as well as theoretical and practical questions yet to be addressed provide direction for future research.     

Hearing Status, Language Modality, and Young Children's Communicative and Linguistic Behavior

This study examined early pragmatic skill development in a group of 38 children with severe or profound hearing loss between 1 and 4 years of age who were enrolled in a simultaneous communication (SC) approach to language learning. Both their use of intentionally communicative acts and their use of language were studied in an analysis of 30-min play sessions between a child and the primary caregiver. Results were compared with previously published data from two age-matched groups: 38 deaf children who were enrolled in oral communication (OC) programs and 84 normally hearing (NH) children. All groups showed a significant improvement with age in the communicative behaviors measured; therefore, the overall trend was toward growth-in all age groups-even when the rates of growth differed. By age 3 years, a pattern of communicative function use had emerged in all three groups. Patterns exhibited by deaf children in the SC and OC groups were similar to each other and to younger NH children but dissimilar to NH age mates. Although the use of signed input by normally hearing parents and teachers did not serve to ameliorate the profound effects of hearing loss on communication development in SC children, it did provide some early advantages. The children in SC groups did not exhibit an advantage over children in OC groups in their overall frequency of communication or the breadth of their vocabulary but they began using words earlier and used mature communicative functions significantly more often. Although children in the OC groups did not exhibit a significant advantage in the overall amount of speech used, they showed an advantage in the breadth of their spoken vocabulary in a conversational setting. Implications for early intervention programming are discussed.     

Effects of Treatment of Hearing Loss in Middle‐Aged Persons with Down Syndrome: A Pilot Study

The extent to which therapeutic intervention of hearing loss may yield better communication and social interaction was investigated in a pilot study during seven months after treatment in twelve hearing impaired subjects with Down syndrome with a mean age of 50.6 years. Although according to spontaneous observations of staff subtle positive reactions to treatment occurred in five subjects, no significant improvement could be measured by means of objective methods. The influence of personal factors like degree of retardation and language development, severity and duration of hearing impairment, age, period of habituation and training, and environmental factors, is to be studied further.     

Ages of diagnosis,amplification, and early intervention of infants and young children with hearing loss: findings from parent interviews

A survey was conducted to determine the status of early identification of children with hearing loss in Illinois. Over a 3-year period, parents of 77 children with severe to profound hearing loss were interviewed while attending an educational program at a state residential school for the Deaf. Results indicated that these children had lower ages of identification than those reported in national studies (Arehart, Yoshinaga-Itano, Thomson, Gabbard, and Stredler Brown, 1998; Harrison & Roush, 1996) and in an earlier study in Illinois (Kittrell & Arjmand, 1997). Delays between suspicion and the initiation of diagnosis and amplification were reported, and were most often attributed to physicians' failure to investigate the possibility of hearing loss. Delays in the onset of early intervention services were noted for half of the children. Although the study reports progress across all areas, the ages of identification, amplification, and early intervention remain higher than recent research (Harrison & Roush, 1996; Kittrell & Arjmand, 1997; Marschark, 1998) indicates is justifiable.     

Speech perception in infancy predicts language development in the second year of life: a longitudinal study

Infants' early phonetic perception is hypothesized to play an important role in language development. Previous studies have not assessed this potential link in the first 2 years of life. In this study, speech discrimination was measured in 6-month-old infants using a conditioned head-turn task. At 13, 16, and 24 months of age, language development was assessed in these same children using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory. Results demonstrated significant correlations between speech perception at 6 months of age and later language (word understanding, word production, phrase understanding). The finding that speech perception performance at 6 months predicts language at 2 years supports the idea that phonetic perception may play an important role in language acquisition.     

The effects of speech and language therapy intervention on children with pragmatic language impairments in mainstream school

In this article, Catherine Adams, clinical senior lecturer in speech and language therapy at the University of Manchester, and Julian Lloyd, senior lecturer in psychology at Newman College, Birmingham, describe the implementation and effects of an intensive programme of speech and language therapy for children who have pragmatic language impairment (PLI) attending mainstream education in the north west of England. An intervention which focused on aspects of pragmatic language such as conversation, inference and narrative was developed. Six children who have PLI (mean age=7;10 years), all with a Statement of special educational needs, participated in a single case study series in which they each received 20 sessions of the speech and language therapy programme in their own school. Guidance and specific training was provided for learning support assistants and classroom teachers. Despite showing heterogeneity in their initial profiles of impairment, progress in conversation skills was seen in all six children and some significant changes in language test performance were found. These findings suggest that intensive speech and language therapy intervention has the potential to produce generalis-able gains in language and communication skills in children who have PLI and indicate appropriate outcome measures for future effectiveness studies.     

Profile of Australian preschool children with speech sound disorders at risk for literacy difficulties

Abstract

Speech sound disorders are a common communication difficulty in preschool children. Teachers indicate difficulty identifying and supporting these children. The aim of this research was to describe speech and language characteristics of children identified by their parents and/or teachers as having possible communication concerns. 275 Australian 4- to 5-year-old children from 45 preschools whose parents and teachers were concerned about their talking participated in speech-language pathology assessments to examine speech, language, literacy, non-verbal intelligence, oromotor skills and hearing. The majority (71.3%) of children demonstrated lower consonant accuracy than expected for their age, 63.9% did not pass the language-screening task, 65.5% had not been assessed and 72.4% had not received intervention from a speech-language pathologist. The 132 children who were identified with speech sound disorder (phonological impairment) were more likely to be male (62.9%) who were unintelligible to unfamiliar listeners, and had poor emergent literacy and phonological processing skills, despite having typical hearing, oral structures, and intelligence. Children identified by parents and teachers with concerns may have a range of speech, language and communication needs requiring professional support.     

Predictors of parental stress in mothers of young children with hearing loss

This study examined parental stress in 184 hearing mothers of young children who are deaf or hard of hearing. Stress levels were measured in three domains using the short-form of the Parental Stress Index (PSI; Abidin, 1995). Mothers in this study demonstrated significantly less parental distress on the PSI than a normative, hearing group, although this difference was quite small. Differences between the hearing and hearing loss samples did not reach conventional levels of significance for the Dysfunctional Parent-Child Interactions or the Difficult Child subscales. An examination of potential predictors of maternal stress revealed that mothers who perceived their daily hassles as more intense also obtained higher stress ratings on all three subscales. Additional predictors of parental distress were frequency of hassles, social support, and annual family income. Increased stress on the Dysfunctional Parent-Child Interaction subscale was predicted by children who had disabilities in addition to hearing loss, more delayed language relative to their chronological age, and less severe degrees of hearing loss. No additional, significant predictors were obtained for the Difficult Child subscale. When all measured variables were controlled for, characteristics that did not predict maternal stress on any of the three subscales included the child's gender, ethnicity, age of identification, mode of communication used, maternal education, and months between age of identification and child age at the time of observation.     

Mastery motivation and expressive language in young children with hearing loss

We studied the relation between mastery motivation and expressive language in 200 young children with hearing loss. Hearing mothers assessed their children's expressive language (Minnesota Child Development Inventory; Ireton & Thwing, 1974) and several aspects of mastery motivation including mastery pleasure and three components of mastery persistence (gross motor, object oriented, and social/symbolic) using the Dimensions of Mastery Motivation Questionnaire (Morgan et al., 1992). Simple correlations revealed significant relations between expressive language and all mastery motivation scales. When demographic and hearing loss variables were entered into a regression equation, only increased social/symbolic persistence was significantly related to, and increased object-oriented persistence was marginally related to, increases in expressive language quotients. Expressive language quotients also increased significantly as child age and degree of hearing loss decreased and as mothers' ratings of their child's general competence increased. In addition, decreases in the age at which the child was enrolled in intervention were marginally related to increases in expressive language quotients (f =.06).     

Income is not enough: incorporating material hardship into models of income associations with parenting and child development

Although research has clearly established that low family income has negative impacts on children's cognitive skills and social-emotional competence, less often is a family's experience of material hardship considered. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 (N=21,255), this study examined dual components of family income and material hardship along with parent mediators of stress, positive parenting, and investment as predictors of 6-year-old children's cognitive skills and social-emotional competence. Support was found for a model that identified unique parent-mediated paths from income to cognitive skills and from income and material hardship to social-emotional competence. The findings have implications for future study of family income and child development and for identification of promising targets for policy intervention.     

Stability of Core Language Skill from Early Childhood to Adolescence: A Latent Variable Approach

This four‐wave prospective longitudinal study evaluated stability of language in 324 children from early childhood to adolescence. Structural equation modeling supported loadings of multiple age‐appropriate multisource measures of child language on single‐factor core language skills at 20 months and 4, 10, and 14 years. Large stability coefficients (standardized indirect effect = .46) were obtained between language latent variables from early childhood to adolescence even when accounting for child nonverbal intelligence and social competence and maternal verbal intelligence, education, speech, and social desirability. Stability coefficients were similar for girls and boys. Stability of core language skill was stronger from 4 to 10 to 14 years than from 20 months to 4 years, so early intervention to improve lagging language is recommended.     

Chinese Parents’ Expectations and Child Preacademic Skills: The Indirect Role of Parenting and Social Competence

Research Findings: This study examined how parenting styles and child social-emotional functioning may help explain the indirect relations between Chinese parents’ expectations for their preschool-age children’s social-emotional development and their children’s preacademic skills. A total of 154 parents with preschool-age children were recruited from 7 preschools located in northeastern China. The results showed that when parents expected their child to master social-emotional skills at a younger age or when they placed more value on social-emotional skills, they were more likely to adopt authoritative parenting, their children had better social competence, and finally their children showed better preacademic skills. The findings not only provided support for the interconnections between Chinese young children’s social-emotional functioning and preacademic skills but also revealed parenting styles and child social competence as potential pathways through which parents’ social-emotional expectations relate to children’s preacademic skills. Practice or Policy: The findings can be used to facilitate parent education efforts to help contemporary Chinese parents reflect on and even adjust their developmental expectations for young children. Parental expectations can also be an important element to consider in prevention and intervention programs that are designed to improve young children’s social-emotional and preacademic skills.     

Small Talk: Identifying communication problems in maltreated children

Development of speech and language is rapid in early years, yet if developmental problems in speech and language are not addressed they are likely to continue and impact negatively on a child's overall development and their life trajectory. Children who have experienced abuse and or neglect are particularly vulnerable. The aim of this study was to develop a tool to assist in identifying a child's need for assessment by a speech pathologist so that there could be early identification of problems. A culturally sensitive tool was developed to be completed by the child's carer included questions on language, speech and hearing, voice, fluency, understanding sentences, vocabulary and expression. Sixty-five children aged between 4 and 8 years, who had experienced abuse and/or neglect participated in the study. Fourteen percent were Aboriginal. A speech pathologist undertook an assessment for each child and the results were compared with the information on the Small Talk tool. The Tool was found to be high in sensitivity but low in specificity, requiring further refinement. However, it has the potential to assist non speech pathologists to identify a child's need for speech and language assessment with the findings identifying the Tool as promising practice.     

Executive function and language in deaf children

The relationship between language and executive function (EF) and their development in children have been the focus of recent debate and are of theoretical and clinical importance. Exploration of these functions in children with a peripheral hearing loss has the potential to be informative from both perspectives. This study compared the EF and language skills of 8- to 12-year-old children with cochlear implants (n = 22) and nonimplanted deaf children (n = 25) with those of age-matched hearing controls (n = 22). Implanted and nonimplanted deaf children performed below the level of hearing children on tests assessing oral receptive language, as well as on a number of EF tests, but no significant differences emerged between the implanted and nonimplanted deaf groups. Language ability was significantly positively associated with EF in both hearing and deaf children. Possible interpretations of these findings are suggested and the theoretical and clinical implications considered.     

Structures underpinning pretend play and word production in young hearing children and children with hearing loss

Relationships between pretend play and word production were investigated in 10 hearing (H) and 10 toddlers with hearing loss (D) who attended an auditory/oral early intervention program. All children were videotaped interacting in free play with their hearing primary caregiver at 28, 29, and 30 months of age. Group comparisons were made for the scores for highest and mean levels of pretend play and for the underlying structures of decontextualization, decentration, sequencing, and planning. Relationships with word production were then explored for the two groups separately. Results showed significantly higher levels of pretend play for all dimensions for the hearing children and an association between level of pretend play and word production for the children with hearing loss. Associations between word production and sequencing and planning were found for both groups of children. Word production was associated with decontextualization for the hearing children and with decentration for the children with hearing loss. We discuss theoretical implications of the findings together with implications for intervention with toddlers who have hearing loss.