Childhood hearing loss presents challenges to language development, especially spoken language. In this article, we review existing literature on deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children's patterns and trajectories of language as well as development of theory of mind and literacy. Individual trajectories vary significantly, reflecting access to early identification/intervention, advanced technologies (e.g., cochlear implants), and perceptually accessible language models. DHH children develop sign language in a similar manner as hearing children develop spoken language, provided they are in a language-rich environment. This occurs naturally for DHH children of deaf parents, who constitute 5% of the deaf population. For DHH children of hearing parents, sign language development depends on the age that they are exposed to a perceptually accessible 1st language as well as the richness of input. Most DHH children are born to hearing families who have spoken language as a goal, and such development is now feasible for many children. Some DHH children develop spoken language in bilingual (sign-spoken language) contexts. For the majority of DHH children, spoken language development occurs in either auditory-only contexts or with sign supports. Although developmental trajectories of DHH children with hearing parents have improved with early identification and appropriate interventions, the majority of children are still delayed compared with hearing children. These DHH children show particular weaknesses in the development of grammar. Language deficits and differences have cascading effects in language-related areas of development, such as theory of mind and literacy development.

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.

90We are very excited about the future of The Volta Review , to build on its greatness and continue its revered position as a first-rate publication. Just as the African proverb proclaims, "it takes a village to raise a child," it takes the AG Bell membership to keep The Volta Review at the forefront of research and scholarship related to children who are deaf and hard of hearing. This work involves the parent members, the professional members, and the members who are deaf and hard of hearing. Katie and I welcome your comments, your suggestions, your ideas, and most importantly any manuscripts that you feel address the concerns of the membership. With your help, The Volta Review will grow and prosper as it undergoes transition and transformation in maintaining its premier role in the field of research related to deafness. Sincerely,The difficulties for students with hearing loss in gaining proficient literacy skills are well documented. However, studies describing the nature and variability of emergent literacy skills for students with hearing loss or the rate at which progress occurs at young ages are limited. We assessed emergent literacy skills and outcomes at the beginning and end of a school year for 44 young children (mean age = 5.2 years) who are deaf and hard of hearing and who had some speech perception skills. These children generally showed gains similar to their peers with typical hearing in knowledge of letter names and common written words, but lagged in phonological awareness skills. Correlational analyses suggest that these skills were systematically related to the children's literacy development, similar to what has been found in children with typical hearing. The results show that children participating in this study progressed on some phonological awareness skills (alliteration, blending, and elision) but not on others (rhyming, syllable segmentation). This article discusses the relevance of the findings for an emergent literacy curriculum .

Early developmental psychologists viewed iconic representation as cognitively less complex than other forms of symbolic thought. It is therefore surprising that iconic signs are not acquired more easily than arbitrary signs by young language learners. One explanation is that children younger than 3 years have difficulty interpreting iconicity. The current study assessed hearing children's ability to interpret the meaning of iconic signs. Sixty-six 2.5- to 5-year-olds who had no previous exposure to signs were required to match iconic signs to pictures of referents. Whereas few of the 2.5-year-olds recognized the meaning of the iconic signs consistently, more than half of the 3.0-year-olds and most of 3.5-year-olds performed above chance. Thus, the ability to recognize the meaning of iconic signs gradually develops during the preschool years. Implications of these findings for sign language development, receptive signed vocabulary tests, and the development of the ability to interpret iconic symbols are discussed.

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We examined communication between hearing mothers and their deaf or hearing children longitudinally at child-ages 22 months and 3 years. Specifically, we analyzed both the effects of child deafness and developmental change on pragmatic and dialogic characteristics of communication. From 22 months to 3 years, deaf and hearing children's communicative skills improved similarly along some dimensions: as they grew older, both deaf and hearing children increased the amount they communicated, became increasingly responsive to their mothers' attentional focus, and were responsible for initiating a higher proportion of the dyads' conversations. On the other hand, deaf children were less skilled at maintaining topics, and the pragmatic function of their communication was more likely to be unclear compared to hearing children. Deaf children were also more likely to direct their mothers and less likely to ask questions than hearing children. Communication by hearing mothers was primarily examined to determine the degree to which they controlled the interactions. Overall, mothers of deaf children were only more controlling along one dimension. Mothers of deaf children used more response controls than mothers of hearing children. However, the majority of measures suggested they did not exert more topic or turn-taking controls than did mothers of hearing children. In addition, mothers of deaf and hearing children seemed equally sensitive to their children's communication abilities. Communication by mothers of both deaf and hearing children changed in similar ways as their children developed. Most of the differences in communication by mothers of deaf and hearing children seemed attributable to the deaf children's linguistic delays. The results suggest that intervention efforts should be focused on fostering linguistic development and not general communication skills or changing maternal conversational control.

Word-learning skills of 19 deaf/hard-of-hearing preschoolers were assessed by observing their ability to learn new words in two contexts. The first context required the use of a novel mapping strategy (i.e., making the inference that a novel word refers to a novel object) to learn the new words. The second context assessed the ability to learn new words after minimal exposure when reference was explicitly established. The children displayed three levels of word-learning skills. Eleven children learned words in both contexts. Five were able to learn new words rapidly only when reference was explicitly established. Two children did not learn new words rapidly in either context. The latter seven children were followed longitudinally. All children eventually acquired the ability to learn new words in both contexts. The deaf children's word-learning abilities were related to the size of their vocabularies. The present study suggests that word-learning strategies are acquired even when children are severely delayed in their language development and they learn language in an atypical environment.

The goal of this study was to explore the development of spoken phonological awareness for deaf and hard-of-hearing children (DHH) with functional hearing (i.e., the ability to access spoken language through hearing). Teachers explicitly taught five preschoolers the phonological awareness skills of syllable segmentation, initial phoneme isolation, and rhyme discrimination in the context of a multifaceted emergent literacy intervention. Instruction occurred in settings where teachers used simultaneous communication or spoken language only. A multiple-baseline across skills design documented a functional relation between instruction and skill acquisition for those children who did not have the skills at baseline with one exception; one child did not meet criteria for syllable segmentation. These results were confirmed by changes on phonological awareness tests that were administered at the beginning and end of the school year. We found that DHH children who varied in primary communication mode, chronological age, and language ability all benefited from explicit instruction in phonological awareness.