Hearing mothers and their deaf children: the relationship between early, ongoing mode match and subsequent mental health functioning in adolescence. (1/19)

In the few studies that have been conducted, researchers have typically found that deaf adolescents have more mental health difficulties than their hearing peers and that, within the deaf groups, those who use spoken language have better mental health functioning than those who use sign language. This study investigated the hypotheses that mental health functioning in adolescence is related to an early and consistent mode match between mother and child rather than to the child's use of speech or sign itself. Using a large existing 15-year longitudinal database on children and adolescents with severe and profound deafness, 57 adolescents of hearing parents were identified for whom data on language experience (the child's and the mother's) and mental health functioning (from a culturally and linguistically adapted form of the Achenbach Youth Self Report) was available. Three groups were identified: auditory/oral (A/O), sign match (SM), and sign mismatch (SMM). As hypothesized, no significant difference in mental health functioning was found between the A/O and SM groups, but a significant difference was found favoring a combined A/O and SM group over the SMM group. These results support the notion of the importance of an early and consistent mode match between deaf children and hearing mothers, regardless of communication modality.  (+info)

The effects of simultaneous communication on production and perception of speech. (2/19)

This article reviews experiments completed over the past decade at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf and the State University of New York at Geneseo concerning speech produced during simultaneous communication (SC) and synthesizes the empirical evidence concerning the acoustical and perceptual characteristics of speech in SC. Comparisons are drawn between SC and other modes of rate-altered speech that have been used successfully to enhance communication effectiveness. Of particular importance are conclusions regarding the appropriateness of speech produced during SC for communication between hearing and hearing-impaired speakers and listeners and the appropriateness of SC use by parents and teachers for speech development of children with hearing impairment. This program of systematic basic research adds value to the discussion about the use of SC by focusing on the specific implications of empirical results regarding speech production and perception.  (+info)

Audism: exploring the metaphysics of oppression. (3/19)

This article traces the development of the concept of "audism" from its inception in the mid-1970s by exploring three distinct dimensions of oppression: individual, institutional, and metaphysical. Although the first two aspects of audism have been identified, there is a deeply rooted belief system regarding language and human identity that is yet to be explored within the context of audism. This article attempts to expose how our particular historical and philosophical constructions of language and being have created what French philosopher Jacques Derrida calls phonocentrism. Although Derrida does not discuss audism, his deconstruction of the Western notion of language provides a lens through which we can better see the orientation that has provided fertile ground out of which individual and institutional audism has flourished.  (+info)

Attachment representations of deaf adults. (4/19)

The primary goal of this study was to examine the feasibility of using the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) with 50 culturally Deaf adults. Modifications to the standard protocol included using a visual-spatial language (American Sign Language) rather than a spoken language (English), as well as coding and procedural variations from the standardized protocol. Results suggested that the adapted AAI interview and coding processes provided an effective assessment of the state of mind regarding the attachment of Deaf individuals. The expectation that Deaf participants would be less coherent in their AAI transcripts and therefore less likely than hearing individuals to be classified as Autonomous was not supported. The distribution of the classifications of this Deaf sample was not different from existing normative distributions. Moreover, there was no evidence that early separation from parents associated with attendance at a residential school for the Deaf resulted in attachment formations with residential counselors or teachers at the school.  (+info)

Phonological processing in deaf children: when lipreading and cues are incongruent. (5/19)

Deaf children exposed to Cued Speech (CS), either before age two (early) or later at school (late), were presented with pseudowords with and without CS. The main goal was to establish the way in which lipreading and CS combine to produce unitary percepts, similar to audiovisual integration in speech perception, when participants are presented with synchronized but different lipreading and auditory information (the McGurk paradigm). In the present experiment, lips and cues were sometimes congruent and sometimes incongruent. It was expected that incongruent cues would force the perceptual system to adopt solutions according to the weight attributed to different sources of phonological information. With congruent cues, performance improved, with improvements greater in the early than the late group. With incongruent cues, performance decreased relative to lipreading only, indicating that cues were not ignored, and it was observed that the effect of incongruent cues increased when the visibility of the target phoneme decreased. The results are compatible with the notion that the perceptual system integrates cues and lipreading according to principles similar to those evoked to explain audiovisual integration.  (+info)

Grammatical Subjects in home sign: Abstract linguistic structure in adult primary gesture systems without linguistic input. (6/19)

Language ordinarily emerges in young children as a consequence of both linguistic experience (for example, exposure to a spoken or signed language) and innate abilities (for example, the ability to acquire certain types of language patterns). One way to discern which aspects of language acquisition are controlled by experience and which arise from innate factors is to remove or manipulate linguistic input. However, experimental manipulations that involve depriving a child of language input are impossible. The present work examines the communication systems resulting from natural situations of language deprivation and thus explores the inherent tendency of humans to build communication systems of particular kinds, without any conventional linguistic input. We examined the gesture systems that three isolated deaf Nicaraguans (ages 14-23 years) have developed for use with their hearing families. These deaf individuals have had no contact with any conventional language, spoken or signed. To communicate with their families, they have each developed a gestural communication system within the home called "home sign." Our analysis focused on whether these systems show evidence of the grammatical category of Subject. Subjects are widely considered to be universal to human languages. Using specially designed elicitation tasks, we show that home signers also demonstrate the universal characteristics of Subjects in their gesture productions, despite the fact that their communicative systems have developed without exposure to a conventional language. These findings indicate that abstract linguistic structure, particularly the grammatical category of Subject, can emerge in the gestural modality without linguistic input.  (+info)

Quantitative and qualitative evaluation of linguistic input support to a prelingually deaf child with cued speech: A case study. (7/19)

This paper studies the linguistic input attended by a deaf child exposed to cued speech (CS) in the final part of her prelinguistic period (18-24 months). Subjects are the child, her mother, and her therapist. Analyses have provided data about the quantity of input directed to the child (oral input, more than 1,000 words per half-an-hour session; cued ratio, more than 60% of oral input; and attended ratio, more than 55% of oral input), its linguistic quality (lexical variety, grammatical complexity, etc.), and other properties of interaction (child attention and use of spontaneous gestures). Results show that both adults provided a rich linguistic input to the child and that the child attended most of the input that the adults cued. These results might explain the positive linguistic development of children exposed early to CS.  (+info)

A comparison of prompting tactics to establish intraverbals in children with autism. (8/19)

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