Advocates of bimodal bilingual (Bi-Bi) early intervention argue that both visual and auditory communication systems reflect optimal family and educational interactions for teachers, families, and their young children with hearing loss. The primary objective of this commentary is to highlight semantic variations noted in theoretical, ideological,…

Reading comprehension and three aspects of working memory--general, visuospatial and phonological--was assessed in 41 children with hearing loss: 23 with cochlear implants and 18 with hearing aids. Performance on these tests was compared between the two groups of children with hearing loss and also related to that of 55 children with typical…

Children who have both a hearing loss and a visual impairment are a very small but extremely heterogeneous low incidence group. These children vary greatly in the types and degrees of visual impairment and hearing loss. The majority of them have some usable vision and/or hearing, and many have additional disabilities. Most professionals (i.e.,…

Acquisition of phoneme-grapheme correspondences, a key concept of the alphabetic principle, was examined in young children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) using a semantic association strategy embedded in two interventions, the Children's Early Intervention and Foundations for Literacy. Single-subject design experiments using multiple…

A study compared continuous discourse tracking rates in eight children (ages 8-14) with hearing impairments and eight typical children using three competing noise conditions: classroom noise, videotaped classroom activity, and combined noise and visual activity. Statistical analyses showed no significant differences among tracking rates due to the…

This article discusses issues involved in psychological assessment of children with hearing loss who have additional disabilities or special needs. It provides recommendations for appropriate methods of assessment that accommodate the communication difficulties associated with hearing loss. This article includes assessment procedures for children…

This study found that three measures of working memory capacity (processing and storage capacity, reading and listening span, and visual shape span) were good predictors of reading achievement in 30 orally educated children (ages 5 to 14) with hearing impairments as well as in an age-matched hearing control group. Degree of hearing loss did not…

A biased selected sample of 82 hearing-impaired children was referred for complete visual evaluations for one-and-a-half years. Sixty-four percent of the children were found to have visual disorders in the major categories of pathology, refractive prescription requirements, and strabismus. The project demonstrated the need for comprehensive early…

This study of 26 children (ages 8-12) with hearing impairment found that the degree of hearing loss and spoken language competence independently affected the ability to understand the information presented on commercial and educational television programs. Language skills were a stronger predictor of comprehension than the degree of hearing loss.…

Factors leading to recognition of the value of acoustic amplification, as employed in the Auditory Global approach to educating hearing impaired children, include the identification of auditory ability differences in children called deaf, the contribution of acoustic phonetics to the understanding of speech perception, and early and comprehensive…

Speech samples from 3 hearing-impaired children (ages 9-11) were videotaped for judgment by 5 teachers in audio-only and audio-video condition. When a teacher evaluated a child's speech using both auditory and visual information, fewer errors were typically noted than if the child's speech was evaluated using only auditory information. (Author/JDD)

Fifty hearing-impaired students, aged 8-12 and 15-19, who used an auditory, visual, or tactile aid in speech training made more progress than controls who received speech training without sensory aids. A visual display was more effective for conveying appropriate average pitch, while the "Portapitch" was useful for conveying dynamic…

The illumination of three conventional classrooms was modified to create optical conditions better suited to visual communication for hearing impaired students. (Author/PHR)

Art experiences can promote feelings of confidence in mainstreamed hearing impaired children. Because of the emphasis on the production of visual/tactile images and objects and the lower demands for verbal communication within the art class, children with low language comprehension and limited verbal facility have a greater opportunity for success…

A study of 156 hearing impaired students (ages 3 to 14 years) was undertaken to see how many of the Ss suffered from a visual anomaly (disease, refractive error, or binocularity). (PHR)