The "bilingual advantage" theory stipulates that constant selection and suppression between 2 languages results in enhanced executive control (EC). Behavioral studies of EC in bilinguals have employed wide-ranging tasks and report some conflicting results. To avoid concerns about tasks, we employed a different approach, measuring gray matter volume (GMV) in adult bilinguals, reasoning that any EC-associated benefits should manifest as relatively greater frontal GMV. Indeed, Spanish-English-speaking bilinguals exhibited greater bilateral frontal GMV compared with English-speaking monolinguals. Was this observation attributable to the constant selection and inhibition of 2 spoken languages? To answer this question, we drew on bimodal bilinguals of American Sign Language (ASL) and English who, unlike unimodal bilinguals, can simultaneously use both languages and have been shown not to possess the EC advantage. In this group, there was no greater GMV when compared with monolinguals. Together these results provide neuroanatomical evidence in support of the bilingual advantage theory.

The study of congenitally deaf adult humans provides an opportunity to examine neuroanatomical plasticity resulting from altered sensory experience. However, attributing the source of the brain's structural variance in the deaf is complicated by the fact that deaf individuals also differ in their language experiences (e.g., sign vs spoken), which likely influence brain anatomy independently. Although the majority of deaf individuals in the United States are born to hearing parents and are exposed to English, not American Sign Language (ASL) as their first language, most studies on deafness have been conducted with deaf native users of ASL (deaf signers). This raises the question of whether observations made in deaf signers can be generalized. Using a factorial design, we compared gray (GMV) and white (WMV) matter volume in deaf and hearing native users of ASL, as well as deaf and hearing native users of English. Main effects analysis of sensory experience revealed less GMV in the deaf groups combined (compared with hearing groups combined) in early visual areas and less WMV in a left early auditory region. The interaction of sensory experience and language experience revealed that deaf native users of English had fewer areas of anatomical differences than did deaf native users of ASL (each compared with their hearing counterparts). For deaf users of ASL specifically, WMV differences resided in language areas such as the left superior temporal and inferior frontal regions. Our results demonstrate that cortical plasticity resulting from deafness depends on language experience and that findings from native signers cannot be generalized.

Previous work in deaf populations on phonological coding and working memory, two skills thought to play an important role in the acquisition of written language skills, have focused primarily on signers or did not clearly identify the subjects' native language and communication mode. In the present study, we examined the effect of sensory experience, early language experience, and communication mode on the phonological awareness skills and serial recall of linguistic items in deaf and hearing individuals of different communicative and linguistic backgrounds: hearing nonsigning controls, hearing users of ASL, deaf users of ASL, deaf oral users of English, and deaf users of cued speech. Since many current measures of phonological awareness skills are inappropriate for deaf populations on account of the verbal demands in the stimuli or response, we devised a nonverbal phonological measure that addresses this limitation. The Phoneme Detection Test revealed that deaf cuers and oral users, but not deaf signers, performed as well as their hearing peers when detecting phonemes not transparent in the orthography. The second focus of the study examined short-term memory skills and found that in response to the traditional digit span as well as an experimental visual version, digit-span performance was similar across the three deaf groups, yet deaf subjects' retrieval was lower than that of hearing subjects. Our results support the claim (Bavelier et al., 2006) that lexical items processed in the visual-spatial modality are not as well retained as information processed in the auditory channel. Together these findings show that the relationship between working memory, phonological coding, and reading may not be as tightly interwoven in deaf students as would have been predicted from work conducted in hearing students.

Nearly 300 million people worldwide have moderate to profound hearing loss. Hearing impairment, if not adequately managed, has strong socioeconomic and affective impact on individuals. Cochlear implants have become the most effective vehicle for helping profoundly deaf children and adults to understand spoken language, to be sensitive to environmental sounds, and, to some extent, to listen to music. The auditory information delivered by the cochlear implant remains non-optimal for speech perception because it delivers a spectrally degraded signal and lacks some of the fine temporal acoustic structure. In this article, we discuss research revealing the multimodal nature of speech perception in normally-hearing individuals, with important inter-subject variability in the weighting of auditory or visual information. We also discuss how audio-visual training, via Cued Speech, can improve speech perception in cochlear implantees, particularly in noisy contexts. Cued Speech is a system that makes use of visual information from speechreading combined with hand shapes positioned in different places around the face in order to deliver completely unambiguous information about the syllables and the phonemes of spoken language. We support our view that exposure to Cued Speech before or after the implantation could be important in the aural rehabilitation process of cochlear implantees. We describe five lines of research that are converging to support the view that Cued Speech can enhance speech perception in individuals with cochlear implants.

).This study compares the rhyme-generation ability of deaf participants with severe to profound hearing losses from cued speech (CS) and non-cued speech (NCS) backgrounds with a hearing comparison group for consistent orthographyto-phonology (O-P) rhyming elements, or rimes (e.g., -ail in sail is always pronounced the same), and inconsistent orthography-to-phonology (I-O-P) rhyming elements where the orthographic rime (e.g., -ear) has different pronunciations in words such as bear and rear. Rhyming accuracy was better for O-P target words than for I-O-P target words. The performance of the deaf participants from CS backgrounds, although falling between that of the hearing and the NCS groups, did not differ significantly from that of the hearing group. By contrast, the performance of the NCS group was lower than that of the hearing group. Hearing and CS participants produced more orthographically different responses (e.g., blue-few), whereas participants from the NCS group produced more responses that are orthographically similar (e.g., blue-true), indicating that the hearing and CS groups rely more on phonology and the NCS group more on spelling to generate rhymes. The results support the use of cued speech for developing phonological abilities of deaf students to promote their reading abilities.Recently in the educational field there has been a resurgence of emphasis on the development of phonological abilities in hearing students. This phenomenon is related in large part to the substantial body of research correlating phonological awareness (including rhyming) in young hearing children with their subsequent reading achievement (Bradley,

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This article focuses on nonsigning hearing parents of deaf children who share the goals of bilingual-bicultural (BiBi) programs for their child, opt for their home language to be their deaf child's first language (L1), and have questions about communication options (e.g., oral methods, manually coded English [MCE] systems, or Cued Speech) for conveying that language. We present research findings related to the effectiveness of MCE systems and Cued Speech for conveying English and developing deaf children's reading abilities. We compare the cueing of English and the signing of MCE systems in terms of theoretical and practical advantages. Finally, we suggest research needs.

The purpose of this survey was to determine how many residential and day schools for deaf and hard-of-hearing students in the United States described themselves as bilingual-bicultural (BiBi) programs and to describe characteristics of those programs related to initial implementation, whether a single language (e.g., English or ASL) is promoted as the first language (L1) and the language of instruction for all deaf students, how English is conveyed conversationally to deaf students, the quality of ASL abilities of BiBi instructional and support staff; general characteristics of the curriculum and the specific reading and bicultural components of the curriculum; and characteristics of research being conducted to establish the efficacy of BiBi methods. Ninety-one percent (n = 71) of the 78 day and residential schools listed in the 1998 Directory of the American Annals of the Deaf participated in the survey, with 19 schools identifying themselves as BiBi. These included 16 residential schools and 3 day schools. Depending on the source for numbers of students in residential and day schools at the time of the survey, between 36% and 40% of students were in programs that identified themselves as BiBi. Sixteen of the programs reported becoming a BiBi program between 1989 and 1994 and only three after 1994. Of the 19 programs, 37% reported use of manually coded English (MCE) for conveying English to the students. Fluency in ASL of instructional and support staff varied, with 47% of the programs reporting that no more than half of the instructional staff were fluent in ASL and 68% of the programs reporting that no more than half of the support staff were fluent. Only 21% of the 19 programs reported having a formal BiBi curriculum with annual goals and suggested materials and procedures for teachers. Research implications of these data are discussed.