Hearing research career development for deaf students

One goal of the Americans with Disabilities Act is to enhance access to career opportunities for individuals with hearing loss. Hearing-impaired professionals are woefully underrepresented among the cadre of scientists currently involved in hearing and deafness research. Information was obtained by questionnaire from 190 consecutive attendees (13 through 17 years of age) at a summer program for gifted hearing-impaired adolescents regarding career goals, attitudes toward academic and extracurricular activities, educational placement, primary communication modality, and parental hearing status. A follow-up questionnaire completed by 80 of these youth, presently attending college, provided comparison data regarding type of college attended and academic major. Males were significantly more likely to select majors in mathematics and science-related disciplines. The percentage of college attendees majoring in the sciences was much lower than the percentage of high school students who aspired to a scientific career. Strategies for attracting qualified hearing-impaired students into science majors should include educational efforts directed at students, parents, and academic advisors.     

Complement structures in the language of deaf students

Four hundred and twenty-seven deaf students (age 10 to 19 years) and 60 hearing children (age eight to 10 years) judged the grammaticality of sample sentences which contained infinitival or gerundive complements. Results indicated improvement with increasing age for deaf students. Even the youngest hearing students consistently obtained higher scores than most of the deaf students. Although the function of the complement (as subject or object) did not make a difference in performance, the type of complement did. POSS-ing complements were easier than for-to complements. Verb type also influenced performance.     

Cognitive processing by prelingual deaf students as a function of language context.

Investigated the influence of language mode (print or sign) and syntax (English or American Sign Language [ASL]) on recall, preference, and comprehension. In Exp I, the effects of reading meaningful print passages in ASL or English were tested for 12 16–29 yr old deaf and 12 16–28 yr old hearing Ss. An effort toward comprehension interpretation was supported for the hearing Ss only. Deaf Ss not trained in ASL exhibited a familiarity with ASL syntax not exhibited by the hearing Ss. In Exp II, meaningful passages were presented to 30 15–19 yr old prelingual deaf Ss in 4 language contexts (signed English, signed ASL, print English, and print ASL) in a free recall task. Results show greater recall from ASL than from English contexts. Findings indicate that the visual orientation of prelingual deaf individuals, regardless of training in ASL, leads to the development of a sign-based encoding system that responds to ASL as a familiar language. (30 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Problem-solving strategies for teaching mathematics to deaf students

This article battles its way through the contemporary philosophical assumptions regarding interactions with traumatized young people. That is, interaction by nurses as they attempt to provide 'a shoulder to cry on', 'someone to trust' or just simply 'a hand to hold'. The young people that are nursed in the hospital setting have experienced illness, surgery and recovery to name just a few, but when confronted with being separated from their families, being frightened and needing a friend the role of nursing takes on many different facets. The child (Pandora) a traumatized child taken from home to a new strange place, is warmly accepted by carers who seem to share a set of beliefs and assumptions about relationships and interaction. This article aims to explore the effects humanist and existentialist philosophy has had in guiding current nursing practice using extracts from his own practice and observations.     

Lexidactylophobia: the (irrational) fear of fingerspelling

Fingerspelling is a system of manually representing the graphemes of a spoken language used by members of Deaf communities worldwide. Yet, at least within the North American educational system, fingerspelling appears to be largely discounted in favor of sign usage, despite its high potential for linkage to the orthographical system of English and literacy development. The author describes fingerspelling in connection with how it is used within the American Deaf community, and also describes the development of fingerspelling skills in deaf (and hearing) children. He also describes how deaf adults use fingerspelling to promote literacy development in young deaf children. Strategies for increasing the use of fingerspelling by teachers and parents of the Deaf are outlined.     

A current study of the social maturity of deaf students.

Administered the Vineland Social Maturity Scale to profoundly and prelingually deaf 5-16 yr olds. 40 Ss attended day school and 75 were in residential programs with frequent or rare home visits. In institutionalized Ss, the social maturity quotients derived from residential informants were significantly lower than those obtained from parental informants and were not significantly correlated. Social maturity quotients derived from parental interviews were found to be related to type of educational program and to be lowest for children in residential programs who visited their homes infrequently. (French summary) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Models of individual trajectories in computer-assisted instruction for deaf students.

Describes a quantitative theory of student trajectories in a computer-assisted instruction course. The theory rests upon qualitative assumptions about information processing, from which a stochastic differential equation can be derived. The differential equation is characteristic of the course, but the constants of integration are estimated separately for each student. The fit of data from 297 deaf 1st-7th graders to theory is reported in terms of the standard scale of grade placement. The mean of the mean standard errors averaged across Ss was .046, which represents a relatively close fit of data to theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Some aspects of the verb system in the language of deaf students

Approximately 480 deaf students (age 10 to 19 years) and 60 hearing students (age eight to 10 years) were asked to judge the grammaticality of sentences containing auxiliary verbs, of sentences where the verb had been deleted, and of sentences in which the verb tense was not marked. The results indicated that deaf students have considerable difficulty with the verb system of English. This difficulty was most pronounced in the formation of tense and voice and in agreement in number and tense. A possible ordering for the acquisition of tense did emerge; from earliest to latest it is: simple past, future, present progressive, perfective, and passive. Improvement in grammaticality judgments appeared to come from an increase in recognition that incorrect sentences were ungrammatical.     

Reliability and validity of generalizable skills instruments for students who are deaf, blind, or visually impaired

The study examined the validity and reliability of four assessments, with three instruments per domain. Domains included generalizable mathematics, communication, interpersonal relations, and reasoning skills. Participants were deaf, legally blind, or visually impaired students enrolled in vocational classes at residential secondary schools. The researchers estimated the internal consistency reliability, test-retest reliability, and construct validity correlations of three subinstruments: student self-ratings, teacher ratings, and performance assessments. The data suggest that these instruments are highly internally consistent measures of generalizable vocational skills. Four performance assessments have high-to-moderate test-retest reliability estimates, and were generally considered to possess acceptable validity and reliability.     

Learning and use of logical symbols by deaf and hearing subjects.

16 11-17 yr. old deaf Ss were as able as hearing Ss matched on age, IQ, and socioeconomic background in learning and using logical concepts, and superior to hearing Ss matched on written language comprehension, IQ, and socioeconomic background in learning these concepts. Verbal language comprehension apparently does not possess an exclusive determining influence in learning and grasping the significance of these concepts. It seems justifiable that the ability to identify correspondences between logical symbolic expressions and their stimulus combinations, to verbalize accurately the rules of these correspondences, and to use learned symbols in new contexts constitute increasingly more difficult levels of conceptual behavior. Supplementary verbalization of rules leads to more successful transfer than learning the rules without correct verbal formulations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reading aloud is not automatic: Processing capacity is required to generate a phonological code from print.

The present experiments tested the claim that phonological recoding occurs "automatically" by assessing whether it uses central attention in the context of the psychological refractory period paradigm. Task 1 was a tone discrimination task and Task 2 was reading aloud. The joint effects of long-lag word repetition priming and stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) were underadditive in Experiment 1, suggesting that an early component of lexical processing does not use central attention. In contrast, nonword letter length and grapheme-phoneme complexity yielded additive effects with SOA in Experiments 2, 3, and 4, suggesting that assembled phonology uses central attention. Further, orthographic neighborhood density also yielded additive effects with SOA in Experiments 5, 6, and 7, suggesting that lexical contributions to phonological recoding use central attention. Taken together, the results of these experiments are inconsistent with the widespread claim that phonological codes are assembled and/or addressed automatically. It is suggested that "automaticity" should be replaced by accounts that make more specific claims about how processing unfolds. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What''s so funny? A comparison of students who are deaf or hard of hearing and hearing students'' appreciation of cartoons

The aim of this study was to explore the association between stressful life events (SLE) and the development of panic disorder (PD) in an Israeli sample. A total of 44 PD patients and a matched control group were studied with regard to SLE over the life cycle (in childhood, adolescence, adulthood and the year preceding the outbreak of the disorder). The major findings were as follows. (i) With regard to the total number of life events experienced in childhood and adolescence, the PD group had experienced significantly more life events than the control group. (ii) No differences were detected in the total amount of SLE between the PD group and the control group with regard to adulthood and the year preceding the outbreak of the disorder, although the PD group had more life events relating to loss in adulthood, whereas in the year before the outbreak of PD life events relating to 'love and family', negative and loss events were more prevalent. These results expand previous findings by demonstrating that SLE in childhood and adolescence may contribute to the development of PD in adulthood.     

Influence of verbal and nonverbal references to print on preschoolers' visual attention to print during storybook reading.

How much do preschool children look at print within storybooks when adults read to them? This study sought to answer this question as well as to examine the effects of adult verbal and nonverbal references to print on children's visual attention to print during storybook reading. Forty-four preschool-aged children participated in this study designed to determine the amount of visual attention children paid to print in 4 planned variations of storybook reading. Children's visual attention to print was examined when adults commented and questioned about print (verbal print condition) or pointed to and tracked the print (nonverbal print condition), relative to 2 comparison conditions (verbatim reading and verbal picture conditions). Results showed that children rarely look at print, with about 5%-6% of their fixations allocated to print in verbatim and verbal picture reading conditions. However, preschoolers' visual attention to print increases significantly when adults verbally and nonverbally reference print; both reading styles exerted similar effects. The authors conclude that explicit referencing of print is 1 way to increase young children's contacts with print during shared storybook reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's inferences with print and pictures.

The primary purpose of this study was to determine whether there is a difference in children's ability to answer inferential questions from pictures, print, and print with pictures. A secondary purpose was to determine whether there is a difference between more skilled and less skilled reader's ability to answer inferential questions in the different modes. The participants in the study were 116 fifth- and sixth-grade students. The materials consisted of 15 photographs and 15 passages of 150 to 200 words. Each student participated in each condition by answering 25 inferential questions. The results indicated that the students performed significantly better in the picture-only and the print-with-picture conditions than in the print-only condition. Although the more skilled readers scored significantly better than the less skilled readers in the print-only condition, there were no differences between the two ability groups in the two picture conditions. Qualitative analyses were also conducted on the students' responses for determining possible sources of errors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)