This study investigated the Individual Learning Plans of eighty-eight students who were deaf and hard of hearing attending facilities and schools for the deaf in Victoria Australia. The students' assessment and planning portfolios were scrutinised for evidence of formal and informal assessment used to generate goals for the Individual…

This study explores the impact of bimodal bilingual parental input on the communication and language development of a young deaf child. The participants in this case study were a severe-to-profoundly deaf boy and his hearing parents, who were enrolled in a bilingual (English and Australian Sign Language) homebased early intervention programme. The…

This study investigated mental health problems in 54 deaf adolescents between 11 and 18 years of age residing in the states of New South Wales and Tasmania in Australia. Mental health problems were assessed using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ; Goodman, 1997). The SDQ Self Report was translated into Australian Sign Language…

This study investigated the beliefs and practices of 28 teachers of the deaf about their practices. The teachers were all working in oral settings either as visiting teachers or teachers in a mainstream school facility supporting groups of students with hearing loss. Teachers who used an Auditory Verbal approach largely adopted a positivist…

This study investigated the potential effects of cochlear implantation and age at implantation on maternal interactional sensitivity. Three groups of dyads were studied at two points over 1 year. The hearing aid (HA) group wore hearing aids throughout the study, the early cochlear implanted (ECI) group were implanted prior to 22 months of age, and…

A key objective when fitting hearing aids to children is to maximize the audibility of high frequency speech cues which are critical in the understanding of spoken English. Recent advances in digital signal processing have enabled the development of hearing aids which offer linear frequency transposition as a new way of accessing these important…

The general trend for the inclusion of deaf and hearing impaired students in Australia involves placing students in a mainstream classroom setting alongside their hearing peers with regular support from a Visiting Teacher of the Deaf. The provision of educational services to deaf and hearing impaired students in regional and rural areas, however,…

Equity of service delivery to families of children with hearing loss is an important outcome that is sometimes difficult to achieve. With the current philosophy of family centred practice, questions arise as to how service can be delivered, how equitable that service might be, and how the quality of service may or may not be affected. There were…

This study investigated the views of parents, newborn hearing screeners and Telethon Speech and Hearing (TSH) professionals of the Western Australian Infant Screening for Hearing (WISH) Program. Three questionnaires were used to gather information from the participants. Sixteen responses to the questionnaire were obtained (five parents, five…

For several decades the intellectual abilities of deaf children and adolescents, as measured by performance IQ, have been reported as comparable with those of hearing children and adolescents. Differences have been reported, however, on measures of verbal IQ, with deaf children and adolescents typically obtaining verbal IQ scores within the low…

This study investigated parents' perceptions of their family's functioning and the level of early intervention support they received as they reflected on their involvement at an oral early intervention centre for children with hearing loss. Overall, parents reported high levels of family functioning and satisfaction with the services they had…

Children with hearing loss and their families are now presenting for early intervention support and guidance at increasingly younger ages. At present there is a paucity of research that informs teachers about early language development in the child with hearing loss. Di-EL First Words (Di-EL) is a diary technique through which parents record their…

This study compared reciprocal utterances of six hearing mother-hearing toddler dyads and six hearing mother-deaf toddler dyads. Child participants were matched by language stage based on Brown's stages of morphological development and were aged between 25 and 45 months. Child participants were observed interacting with their mothers during…

Maternal scaffolding of pretend play was investigated in ten hearing mother/hearing child (Hh) dyads and ten hearing mother/deaf child (Hd) dyads. Three videotaped samples of play interaction were collected when the children were 28, 29 and 30 months of age. The videotapes were segmented according to four levels of maternal participation (dyadic…