Language and Reading Progress of Young Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children

Abstract

We examined the language and reading progress of 336 young DHH children in kindergarten, first and second grades. Trained assessors tested children’s language, reading, and spoken and fingerspelled phonological awareness in the fall and spring of the school year. Children were divided into groups based on their auditory access and classroom communication: a spoken-only group (n = 101), a sign-only group (n = 131), and a bimodal group (n = 104). Overall, children showed delays in language and reading compared to norms established for hearing children. For language, vocabulary standard scores were higher than for English syntax. Although delayed in language, children made expected gains based on hearing norms from kindergarten to second grade. Reading scores declined from kindergarten to second grade. Spoken-only and bimodal children had similar word reading and reading comprehension abilities and higher scores than sign-only children. Spoken-only children had better spoken phonological awareness and nonword reading skills than the other two groups. The sign-only and bimodal groups made similar and significant gains in ASL syntax and fingerspelling phonological awareness.

The Input Matters: Assessing Cumulative Language Access in Deaf and Hard of Hearing Individuals and Populations

“…Discriminating Disorder From Delay/Difference At the group level, language skills in DHH children are often found to be, on average, between 1 and 2 standard deviations below those of test norms (which almost invariably represent monolingual children with typical hearing) or demographically matched hearing controls (Koehlinger et al, 2013;Tobey et al, 2013;Ambrose et al, 2014Ambrose et al, , 2015Tomblin et al, 2015;Eisenberg et al, 2016;Geers et al, 2017;Lewis et al, 2017;Hoffman et al, 2018;Lederberg et al, 2019;Antia et al, 2020). Of course, there is considerable heterogeneity at the individual level, and clinicians are charged with supporting one child at a time: assessing their current level of proficiency, making informed inferences about the reasons behind specific areas of weakness or strength, devising individualized interventions, and making recommendations to the child's family and the other allied professionals on the child's team.…”

“…The lack of true population-based datasets in the United States makes it difficult to know for certain, but large, multi-site/multi-state studies such as CDaCI, OCHL, and NECAP typically report language outcomes in DHH children that are 1-2 standard deviations below their hearing peers, or language quotients below the 80% threshold (Koehlinger et al, 2013;Tobey et al, 2013;Ambrose et al, 2014Ambrose et al, , 2015Tomblin et al, 2015;Eisenberg et al, 2016;Geers et al, 2017;Lewis et al, 2017;Hoffman et al, 2018;Yoshinaga-Itano et al, 2018). A separate and more recent study of over 336 DHH children between kindergarten and second grade reported similar outcomes on measures of spoken language, with mean scores again ranging from 1 to more than 2 standard deviations below the normative mean (Lederberg et al, 2019;Antia et al, 2020). These values are commensurate with the findings of a large, longitudinal, population-based study in Australia (LOCHI; see Ching et al, 2010Ching et al, , 2018 for language outcomes at age 3 and 5, respectively).…”

Kindergarten Readiness in Children Who Are Deaf or Hard of Hearing Who Received Early Intervention

“…Although K-readiness may be considered predictive of academic success (eg, age-and/or gradeappropriate reading levels and high school graduation), 20,21 in children who are D/HH, K-readiness measures may not be sufficient predictors. Antia et al 47 noted average reading skills in kindergartners who were D/HH; by second grade, reading comprehension scores were nearly 2 SD below population norms. Other research has revealed that a high proportion of students consistently have reading skills below age-and grade-appropriate levels.…”

Chapter Phonological Coding in Visual Language Processing - Brysbaert in Snowling et al (2022)

“…If phonology is important for reading, then deaf people should be at a disadvantage. Many people born deaf struggle to learn to read and do not reach a high level (Antia et al, 2020;Adlof et al, this volume). For those that do, phonology appears to be implicated.…”

“…This finding suggests that the orthographic code alone may not be enough for fluent reading, even for people with hearing impairments (but see Costello et al, 2021, for a different view). Further evidence for a supporting role of phonology in deaf readers is the finding that phonological knowledge and exposure to speechreading predict reading skills in primary school children with hearing impairments (e.g., Antia et al, 2020;Harris et al, 2017). A remaining question is whether the phonology-based effects in deaf people come from spoken language (e.g., via speechreading) or can be based on sign language (e.g., Keck & Wolgemuth, 2020).…”