Language development in deaf children's interactions with deaf and hearing adults: a Dutch longitudinal study

The language development of two deaf girls and four deaf boys in Sign Language of the Netherlands (SLN) and spoken Dutch was investigated longitudinally. At the start, the mean age of the children was 3;5. All data were collected in video-recorded semistructured conversations between individual children and deaf and hearing adults. We investigated the lexical richness and syntactic complexity of the children's utterances in SLN and spoken Dutch, as well as language dominance and interactional participation. Richness and complexity increase over time, as well as children's participation. An important outcome is that syntactic complexity is higher in utterances with both sign and speech. SLN does not have higher outcomes on richness or complexity, but is dominant in terms of frequency of use.     

Parenting stress and social support in hearing mothers of deaf and hearing children: a longitudinal study

This longitudinal study investigated the impact of child deafness on mothers' stress, size of social networks, and satisfaction with social support. Twenty-three hearing mothers of deaf children and 23 hearing mothers of hearing children completed a series of self-report questionnaires when their children were 22 months, 3, and 4 years old. When children were 22 months, more mothers of deaf children reported pessimism about their children's achieving self-sufficiency and concerns about their children's communication abilities than did mothers of hearing children. When their children were 3 and 4 years old, mothers of deaf and hearing children did not differ in their reports of general parenting stress, as measured by the Parenting Stress Index (PSI). Likewise, mothers' ratings of satisfaction with social support were not affected by child deafness, nor did they change developmentally. Mothers of deaf and hearing children did differ in the types of support networks utilized. Mothers of deaf 22-month-olds reported significantly larger professional support networks, while mothers of hearing children reported significantly larger general support networks across all child ages. Mothers' feelings of stress and satisfaction with social support were very stable across the 2 years examined. The results suggest that most mothers of deaf children do not feel a high level of general parenting stress or dissatisfaction with their lives and support networks. However, mothers of deaf children are likely to feel stress in areas specific to deafness. In addition, because parenting stress was highly stable, special efforts should be made to intervene when mothers of deaf children are expressing high levels of stress.     

Hearing dogs: a longitudinal study of social and psychological effects on deaf and hard-of-hearing recipients

The organization Hearing Dogs for Deaf People provides assistance dogs that alert their deaf or hard-of-hearing recipients to key sounds, thus increasing their independence and also providing companionship. Fifty-one recipients took part in a longitudinal study to monitor the dogs' working performance over time and to examine the social and psychological effects of having a Hearing Dog. The Profile of Mood State (POMS) questionnaire and the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) were used together with a Hearing Dog Questionnaire (HDQ) specifically developed for this study. There were a number of significant differences in measures of well-being between the period prior to placing the Hearing Dog and the period after placement, but there were no comparable differences during the year-long waiting period prior to placement of the dog. Recipients reported significant reductions in hearing-related problems such as response to environmental sounds; significant reductions in measures of tension, anxiety, and depression; and significant improvements in social involvement and independence. The longitudinal nature of this study supports evidence that these improvements persist for some time after the placement of a dog, with significant differences being reported, in many cases, up to 18 months after acquiring a dog.     

Graphophonological processes in dyslexic readers of French: A longitudinal study of the explicitness effect of tasks

Given the well-acknowledged phonological deficit found in dyslexic children, this study was aimed at investigating graphophonological processes in dyslexic readers of French over a 1-year period. Among the different types of phonological processing can be distinguished those related to phonological awareness based on knowledge of the oral language and graphophonological processes based on correspondences between the oral and the written language. In this study, we evaluated graphophonemic and graphosyllabic processes using, in each case, two different tasks varying in the degree of cognitive constraint associated with the task (CC- vs CC+). Twenty 11 year-old dyslexic students were compared with younger normal-readers of the same reading level (RA, n=26) and to normal-readers of the same age (CA, n=24). Two variables were considered in the analyses: accuracy and response latency. Results show that dyslexic readers do process written items at the graphophonological level. Also, results indicate main effects of task (CC- vs CC+), time (T1 vs T2), and group (DYS vs RA vs CA). In general, dyslexic participants' performances are comparable to those of RA and differ from those of CA.     

Automaticity, retrieval processes, and reading: a longitudinal study in average and impaired readers

In this longitudinal investigation, the development of word-retrieval speed and its relationship to reading was studied in 72 average and 11 severely impaired readers in the kindergarten to grade 2 period (5-8 years). Subjects received a battery of 3 reading measures and 4 continuous naming tests with varied stimulus requirements. Results indicated that the relationship of retrieval speed to reading is a function of development and the correspondence between higher- and lower-level processes in the specific retrieval and reading measures. As automaticity in retrieval developed in average readers, naming-speed/reading relationships moved from strong, general predictions to highly differentiated ones. The strongest correlations were between naming speed for graphological stimuli and lower-level reading tasks. Impaired readers performed slower than average readers on all naming measures across all years, particularly on graphological symbols. 3 dyslexic subgroups emerged: the largest was globally impaired across all naming rate and reading tasks; 2 smaller subgroups had early specific, retrieval-rate deficits and dissociated reading deficits.     

Component processes of early reading, spelling, and narrative writing skills in Turkish: a longitudinal study

The study examined: (a) the role of phonological, grammatical, and rapid automatized naming (RAN) skills in reading and spelling development; and (b) the component processes of early narrative writing skills. Fifty-seven Turkish-speaking children were followed from Grade 1 to Grade 2. RAN was the most powerful longitudinal predictor of reading speed and its effect was evident even when previous reading skills were taken into account. Broadly, the phonological and grammatical skills made reliable contributions to spelling performance but their effects were completely mediated by previous spelling skills. Different aspects of the narrative writing skills were related to different processing skills. While handwriting speed predicted writing fluency, spelling accuracy predicted spelling error rate. Vocabulary and working memory were the only reliable longitudinal predictors of the quality of composition content. The overall model, however, failed to explain any reliable variance in the structural quality of the compositions.     

Self-concept and ego development in deaf adolescents: a comparative study

Self-concept and ego development, two intertwined aspects of self-indicating well-being and social-cognitive maturation, respectively, were examined in a representative sample of deaf adolescents of normal intelligence (N = 68), using translated and adapted versions of Harter's (1988, Manual for the self-perception profile for adolescents. Denver, CO: University of Denver) multidimensional measure of self-concept and Loevinger's (1998, Technical foundations for measuring ego development. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum) measure of ego development. Compared to hearing norm groups, deaf adolescents showed lower levels of self-perceived social acceptance, close friendships and ego development and higher physical appearance. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses controlling for sociodemographic variables showed positive associations of global self-worth with support for signing during childhood and quality of parent-child communication and of ego development with attending a regular school. Cluster analysis identified three social competence profiles: uniformly low competence, uniformly high competence, and low social acceptance with high physical appearance. Cluster membership was associated with school type, ego development, and (past) neurological disorder. The results are discussed in reference to interventions aimed at the well-being of deaf youth.     

Why do deaf participants have a lower performance than hearing participants in a visual rhyming task: a phonological hypothesis

During a visual rhyming task, deaf participants traditionally perform more poorly than hearing participants in making rhyme judgements for written words in which the rhyme and the spelling pattern are incongruent (e.g. hair/bear). It has been suggested that deaf participants’ low accuracy results from their tendency to rely on orthographic similarity. To test this interpretation more directly, we compared profoundly and prelingually deaf, orally educated participants and hearing participants’ accuracy during a visual rhyming judgement task in which the two words of a pair share the orthographic rime, in order to discourage usage of a purely orthographic strategy. Accuracy was lower in deaf than in hearing participants. The gradient of difficulty between items, together with the finding of a significant correlation between accuracy and the consistency of the grapheme to rhyme, suggest that difference in accuracy between groups might be explained by an over regularization in deaf people, which is probably linked to less diversified phonological representations.     

Language and theory of mind: a study of deaf children

Theory-of-mind (ToM) abilities were studied in 176 deaf children aged 3 years 11 months to 8 years 3 months who use either American Sign Language (ASL) or oral English, with hearing parents or deaf parents. A battery of tasks tapping understanding of false belief and knowledge state and language skills, ASL or English, was given to each child. There was a significant delay on ToM tasks in deaf children of hearing parents, who typically demonstrate language delays, regardless of whether they used spoken English or ASL. In contrast, deaf children from deaf families performed identically to same-aged hearing controls (N=42). Both vocabulary and understanding syntactic complements were significant independent predictors of success on verbal and low-verbal ToM tasks.     

Working memory capacity and comprehension processes in deaf readers

This research studied deaf students' performance on memory span and component reading tasks that incorporated processes involved in higher level comprehension. The instruments developed in the study provide the basis for the measurement of functional working memory capacity, vocabulary knowledge, domain-relevant knowledge, and inference abilities. Multiple regression analysis was used to construct models that show the contributions of the independent assessments to reading comprehension ability. Overall results suggest that working memory operates as a general executive system, as indicated by significant correlations between subjects' performance on reading and nonreading tasks. Limitations in vocabulary knowledge continue to pose problems in reading for deaf individuals. General or procedural knowledge also plays a part in reading comprehension processes.     

The development of reading speed in Italians with dyslexia: a longitudinal study

The development of reading speed in Italian children with dyslexia was estimated using individualized growth curves for a group of 38 children with dyslexia tested longitudinally from the second to the eighth grade and compared with typical readers. Their reading speed development followed a linear trend of .3 syllables per second per grade, approximately half the increment observed in typical children reading a passage and similar to typical children's reading of nonword lists. These findings give support to the deficit hypothesis versus the lag hypothesis and to reading speed as the core deficit in dyslexia with transparent orthographies.     

The relationships between reading processes and English skills of deaf college students

This research project investigated the relationships between various working memory (WM) recoding processes and English language skills in a sample of 86 prelingually deaf college students from varied educational backgrounds. Part 1 reports the results of a short-term memory (STM) experiment and a Recoding Strategies questionnaire. The STM results suggested that, for most deaf students, neither the speech, sign, or visual codes are as efficient as the speech code of hearing persons for the purpose of maintaining English linguistic information in WM. However, the ability to use speech-based recoding processes was positively correlated with WM capacity, and the use of sign recoding was found to decrease as the ability to make efficient use of a speech recoding strategy increased. In addition, the questionnaire data suggested that neither the speech nor sign recoding systems provide the majority of students with a complete internal representation of English surface structure grammatical information in WM. There was no evidence that the use of sign language in education interfered with the ability to develop a speech recoding strategy, or that knowledge of American Sign Language (ASL) negatively influenced the acquisition of English skills. The overall pattern of results suggested that WM processes and recoding strategies may be influencing grammatical processes, and the acquisition of English skills, in distinctive ways.     

Conceptions of ability as stable and self-evaluative processes: a longitudinal examination

It has generally been taken for granted that conceiving of ability as stable leads to negative self-evaluative processes, particularly in the face of failure. Yet, a close examination of the empirical findings suggests that the picture may be more complex. In this research, a three-wave longitudinal design spanning 12 months was employed. Older elementary school children (N = 932) indicated their conceptions of academic and social ability as stable to external forces and to internal forces. They also provided information about the importance they place on academic and social competence, their knowledge about academic and social performance, their preference for academic challenge, their perceptions of academic and social competence, and their attributions for academic and social performance. Children's grades in school and their acceptance by peers were obtained as indicators of performance. Over time, conceiving of ability as stable to external forces, particularly in the academic domain, appeared to heighten the importance placed on competence, performance knowledge, preference for challenge, perceptions of competence, and self-enhancing attributions. In contrast, conceptions of ability as stable to internal forces, particularly in the academic domain, appeared to be fostered by placing little importance on competence, a lack of performance knowledge, avoidance of challenge, negative perceptions of competence, self-deprecating attributions, and poor performance.     

The construction of experience: a longitudinal study of representation and behavior

Continuity in relationship representation and developmental links between relationship representation and behavior from infancy to late adolescence were examined using longitudinal data from a risk sample (N = 185). Significant correlations were found among diverse representational assessments (e.g., interview, drawing, projective narrative) and between representational and concurrent observational measures of relationship functioning. Structural equation models were analyzed to investigate the relations among caregiving experience in infancy; relationship representation and experience in early childhood, middle childhood, and early adolescence; and socioemotional functioning in adolescence. A model representing interactive contributions of representational and behavioral experience represented the data significantly better than a model representing noninteractive contributions. Findings support an organizational developmental view that socioemotional adaptation arises from the progressive construction of mutually informing expectations and experience.     

Effects of public day-care: a longitudinal study

119 Swedish children were followed from their first year of life up to the age of 8. Most could be classified according to (a) type of day-care they had experienced during their first 7 years of life and (b) time of first entrance into day-care. At 8 years, the children were tested with aptitude tests and rated by their teachers on school performance and social and personal development. Hierarchical regression analyses and MANCOVAs were used in the statistical treatment. Time of entrance into day-care predicted children's cognitive and socioemotional development, controlling for sex and home background. Children with early day-care (entrance before the age of 1) were generally rated more favorably and performed better than children with late entrance or home care. There was a tendency for early center care to predict a more favorable outcome than other care.     

Development of deaf identity: an ethnographic study

This ethnographic study explores the identity development of 9 deaf participants through the narratives of their educational experiences in either mainstream or special schools for the Deaf. This exploration goes beyond a binary conceptualization of deaf identity that allows for only the medical and social models and proposes a bicultural dialogue model. This postmodern theoretical framework is used to examine the diversity of identities of deaf learners. The inclusion of the researcher's own fluid cross-cultural identity as a bicultural DeaF participant in this study provides an auto-ethnographic gateway into exploring the lives of other deaf, Deaf, or bicultural DeaF persons. The findings suggest that deaf identity is not a static concept but a complex ongoing quest for belonging, a quest that is bound up with the acceptance of being deaf while finding one's voice in a hearing-dominant society. Through the use of dialogue and narrative tools, the study challenges educators, parents, and researchers to broaden their understanding of how deaf identity, and the dignity associated with being a deaf person is constructed.     

The role of practice in chess: A longitudinal study

We investigated the role of practice in the acquisition of chess expertise by submitting a questionnaire to 104 players of different skill levels. Players had to report their chess rating, the number of hours of individual and group practice, their use of different learning resources and activities, and whether they had been trained by a coach. The use of archival data enabled us to track the rating of some of the players throughout their career. We found that there was a strong correlation between chess skill and number of hours of practice. Moreover, group practice was a better predictor of high-level performance than individual practice. We also found that masters had a higher chess rating than expert players after only three years of serious dedication to chess, although there were no differences in the number of hours of practice. The difference that may explain the variation in rating is that masters start practising at an earlier age than experts. Finally, we found that activities such as reading books and using computer software (game databases, but not playing programs) were important for the development of high-level performance. Together with previous data and theories of expert performance, our results indicate limits in the deliberate practice framework and make suggestions on how best to carry out learning in chess and in other fields.     

Attention interchanges at story-time: a case study from a deaf and hearing twin pair acquiring Swedish sign language in their deaf family

This case study longitudinally analyzes and describes the changes of attentional expressions in interchanges between a pair of fraternal twins, 1 deaf and 1 hearing, from the age of 10-40 months, and their Deaf family members. The video-observed attentional expressions of initiating and reestablishing interchange were grouped in 5 functional categories: getting, directing, maintaining, redirecting, and checking attention. Changes appear to be associated with development during the twins' ages of 10-13, 15-24, and 28-40 months, including the use of vision in communication. Although there are similarities in the changes of each twin's communicative initiations, there are also differences based on hearing status, personality, and use of modality. This is evident in the ways in which each twin's individual attention interchanges unfold over time; it is also connected with the parents' negotiating attention and arranging seating positions with them. Implications and findings for special educational purposes are discussed.