Welcome to Volume 15 and the 15th year of the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education. Throughout this volume, the two of us will be co-editing a special section on Deaf Studies, to appear in each issue. A bit of history will be instructive. In 1985, the field of Deaf Studies was in its infancy. Studies of and by deaf people were about their languages, their behaviors, their community histories, and only occasionally about their cultures. In that year, the First International Deaf Researchers Workshop was held at Bristol University. It was limited to deaf participants only and attended by interested scholars and teachers from all over the world. One of the co-editors of the Deaf Studies section (Tom) spoke at this conference on distinguishing deaf people from Deaf people, a convention that had been used before, but not widely, and became known as ‘‘small d’’ and ‘‘big D.’’ The ways that ‘‘deaf ’’ interact with ‘‘Deaf ’’ turned out to be very complex, indeed, perhaps more than we imagined at the time. Discussion for the duration of the conference and for several years after reflected both our determination to understand how to think about categorization and segmentation of people who are deaf and the sometimes problematic ambiguity when we use the sign ‘‘DEAF.’’ So went Deaf Studies, an emerging field marked by ambiguity. Ten years later, in 1995, a group of investigators interested in sign language, the development of deaf children, cognition and learning among deaf individuals, and related areas came together and created the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education. Finding a publisher was not as difficult as expected, but among the other early tasks was naming the new journal. Input was solicited from a broad audience and suggestions varied widely. It was clear that the word ‘‘deafness’’ was to be avoided, and some people were averse to using ‘‘deaf ’’ as an adjective. One (hearing) observer, for example, emphatically argued that terms like ‘‘deaf education’’ do not make sense, even if they are commonly used. Others argued against phrases like ‘‘deaf children’’ in favor of options like ‘‘children who are deaf and hard of hearing.’’ Attempts to resolve all the contradictory advice yielded either titles too long to fit on the spine of the journal or ones that failed to capture the diverse content that we hoped to publish. At one point, the name quest was taken to Gallaudet University, where a large number of researchers had gathered for a conference on education. Mutually exclusive suggestions continued to overwhelm the editorial group until it was suggested that one of them (the other co-editor of the Deaf Studies section,Marc) ask a prominent member of the Deaf community attending the conference for advice. The situation was explained to her and she responded ‘‘It doesn’t matter which name you choose. You are hearing, whatever you choose will be [seen by others as] wrong. If you were deaf, whatever you choose would be right.’’ Armed with that wisdom, the group sought out the broadest possible title and settled on the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education. No conflicts of interest were reported. Correspondence should be sent to Marc Marschark, Center for Education Research Partnerships, National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Rochester Institute of Technology, 52 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester, NY 14623 (e-mail: marc.marschark@ rit.edu).
Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children are more at risk than hearing children for developing cognitive deficits despite universal newborn hearing screening, early intervention, early input of sign language, and pediatric cochlear implantation. DHH children and adolescents may exhibit cognitive differences due to differences in perception and language modality. They may also experience an elevated risk of developing cognitive deficits due to periods of linguistic and cognitive deprivation and periods of chronic stress and fatigue. This chapter describes the possible causes for cognitive deficits of DHH children and the consequences for learning, both direct (because of cognitive overload) and indirect (because of behavior problems). Subsequently, the chapter outlines the various ways in which cognitive deficits may be accommodated through preventive measures, structured instruction, and specific interventions. The chapter concludes that, in all areas, there is first and foremost a need for more well-constructed effect studies. At the same time, application and further evaluation of the few available well-designed interventions are highly recommended.
Abstract Deaf students tend to lag behind their hearing peers across the curriculum. This is partly a direct result of delays in language acquisition. But a complex of factors associated with deaf children’s learning, including language, cognitive development, social–emotional functioning, and educational experiences, will affect achievement in other domains as well. Beyond reading and writing, mathematics is the most widely evaluated area of the curriculum for deaf as well as hearing learners, but there is also some information relevant to the present discussion concerning science education. This chapter addresses both domains, together with related factors likely to influence learning and other academic areas as well.
The unskilled and unaware effect refers to the finding that individuals who are less knowledgeable or less skilled in a domain are relatively less able to evaluate their level of skill or effectively utilise feedback relative to individuals who are more skilled. Studies finding deaf students less accurate than hearing students in estimating their English vocabulary knowledge and in judging how much they are learning from material presented via sign language have attributed those results to the unskilled and unaware effect, citing the lack of language fluencies frequently demonstrated among deaf learners. The present study addressed the issue more directly by comparing both deaf and hearing individuals who were more and less skilled in four domains, three linguistic and one nonlinguistic. Results indicated that even individuals who are unskilled in a nonlinguistic domain can evaluate their performance when they are aware of what skilled performance would look like, and that unskilled and unaware effects can be influenced by individuals’ desires to be skilled.
Abstract Norms on 464 metaphors are presented for 10 dimensions representing ratings of comprehensibility, some perceived metaphoric qualities, imagery values, familiarity, and tenor-vehicle relatedness. The items were either literary metaphors selected from works of poetry (N = 204) or nonliterary metaphors generated by the experimenters (N = 260). Analyses of the normative data indicated that (a) the mean ratings of the metaphors were reliable (average Cronbach alpha = 0.88); (b) even so, individuals varied in their reactions to the metaphors; (c) the 10 dimensions correlated substantially with one another; and (d) literary and nonliterary metaphors showed similar patterns for the descriptive and relational statistics examined. These data demonstrate the need for metaphor researchers to consider multiple attributes if they are to achieve less confounded or factorial variation of theoretically motivated variables. The normative data provided here exhibit sufficient variation among items and independence among scales for use in such studies.
Abstract We mentioned in the preface that we initiated this project in an attempt to better understand whether or not being deaf or growing up with a sign language as a first language might influence the course of cognitive development differently from growing up hearing and learning a spoken language. Necessarily, this is a discussion about the relations of language and cognition and how such relations might be affected by developmental histories, age, and the particular language of interest. However, determining the extent to which modality-specific language effects appear in cognitive development or the extent to which particular cognitive processes differentially affect the acquisition of signed versus spoken languages requires some basic agreement on the language or cognitive mechanisms that underlie observable (or inferable) behaviors. It also requires some agreement on what qualifies as a purely linguistic process as opposed to a more general process that happens to be operating on linguistic information. To the extent that assumptions about these two issues differ, conclusions about possible interactions of language and cognition in development or in any given situation will vary considerably. Therefore, in this chapter, we review the primary issues surrounding possible links between language development and cognitive development and consider what arguments our three contributors find most compelling.
The notion of the Deaf community as a linguistic-cultural minority has been increasingly recognized and studied over the last two decades. However, significant differences of opinion and perspective within that population typically have been neglected in the literature. Social dominance orientation (SDO), a theoretical construct, typically focusing on intergroup perceptions and relations, is one aspect that has been left unexplored and might prove particularly enlightening. The present study investigated SDO among 119 deaf and 49 hearing young adults through a standardized SDO questionnaire. SDO was examined with regard to cultural identities (deaf, hearing, bicultural, and marginal), cochlear implant use, and language orientation (sign language or spoken language). The deaf participants were found to be more egalitarian than hearing individuals overall. Deaf individuals who held the strongest deaf identities, those who were sign language oriented, and not cochlear implant users, were the most egalitarian.
Reading achievement among deaf students typically lags significantly behind hearing peers, a situation that has changed little despite decades of research. This lack of progress and recent findings indicating that deaf students face many of the same challenges in comprehending sign language as they do in comprehending text suggest that difficulties frequently observed in their learning from text may involve more than just reading. Two experiments examined college students’ learning of material from science texts. Passages were presented to deaf (signing) students in print or American Sign Language and to hearing students in print or auditorially. Several measures of learning indicated that the deaf students learned as much or more from print as they did from sign language, but less than hearing students in both cases. These and other results suggest that challenges to deaf students’ reading comprehension may be more complex than is generally assumed.
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