This study investigated the mental health problems of 89 deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) adolescents in New South Wales, Tasmania, and Western Australia. Participants completed the written (for oral students) or signed version for competent Australian Sign Language (Auslan) users version of the Youth Self Report (YSR). Students were educated in a…

Lexical comprehension and production is directly evaluated for the first time in deaf signing children below the age of 3 years. A Picture Naming Task was administered to 8 deaf signing toddlers (aged 2-3 years) who were exposed to Sign Language since birth. Results were compared with data of hearing speaking controls. In both deaf and hearing…

What supports deaf signers advantage over nonsigners on visuospatial short-term memory (STM) tasks is still a matter of debate. We compared the performance of 18 deaf Italian Sign Language (LIS) users with that of a matched group of Italian hearing nonsigners in three different tasks: two versions of the Corsi Block test, namely span forward and…

The link between vocabulary and later literacy is well documented in the research base. One way children gain vocabulary is through incidental learning. Deaf or hard-of-hearing children (D/HH) often struggle with incidental learning and require vocabulary intervention to increase their lexicon. An effective vocabulary intervention is storybook…

The present study evaluated the efficacy of a new preschool early literacy intervention created specifically for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children with functional hearing. Teachers implemented "Foundations for Literacy" with 25 DHH children in 2 schools (intervention group). One school used only spoken language, and the other used…

This paper examines the concept of phonological awareness (PA) as it relates to the processing of American Sign Language (ASL). We present data from a recently developed test of PA for ASL and examine whether sign language experience impacts the use of metalinguistic routines necessary for completion of our task. Our data show that deaf signers…

Despite research commenting on and analyzing signed poetry, there is little research exploring the aims and intentions of the signing poets. This paper considers the producers of signed poetry, rather than their products. Using material gathered from interviews with three established signing deaf poets, we consider what they hope to achieve when…

To address the paucity of current research on the development of creativity in deaf students, and to extend existing research to adolescents, the present study investigated divergent thinking, a method of assessing creativity, in both deaf and hearing adolescents. We assessed divergent thinking in two domains, figural and verbal, while also…

The present study examined whether full access to sign language as a medium for instruction could influence performance in Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks. Three groups of Italian participants (age range: 6-14 years) participated in the study: Two groups of deaf signing children and one group of hearing-speaking children. The two groups of deaf…

The present study is aimed to translate 3 widely used clinical assessment measures into British Sign Language (BSL), to pilot the BSL versions, and to establish their validity and reliability. These were the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), the Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-item (GAD-7) scale, and the Work and Social Adjustment Scale (WSAS).…

The study explores the communication challenges faced by teacher trainees in teaching deaf learners and the opportunities that they present. A critical disabilities study approach within the qualitative paradigm was employed to collect interview data from 14 trainee teachers (6 were men and 8 women) and 5 of their specialist mentors (all of them…

Families with deaf parents and hearing children are often bilingual and bimodal, with both a spoken language and a signed one in regular use among family members. When interviewed, 13 American hearing adults with deaf parents reported widely varying language practices, sign language abilities, and social affiliations with Deaf and Hearing…

We explored variation in the linguistic environments of hearing children of Deaf parents and how it was associated with their early bilingual language development. For that purpose we followed up the children's "productive vocabulary" (measured with the MCDI; MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory) and "syntactic complexity" (measured with…

Talking to oneself can be silent (inner speech) or vocalized for others to hear (private speech, or soliloquy). We investigated these two types of self-communication in 28 deaf signers and 28 hearing adults. With a questionnaire specifically developed for this study, we established the visible analog of vocalized private speech in deaf signers.…

This study investigated the effects of hearing status and age of signed language acquisition on signed language working memory capacity. Professional Auslan (Australian sign language)/English interpreters (hearing native signers and hearing nonnative signers) and deaf Auslan signers (deaf native signers and deaf nonnative signers) completed an…