"Language and Reading Progress of Young Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children"

Chancellor's Professor Carol Connor has published with colleagues in the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education. The title of the article is "Language and Reading Progress of Young Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children." Co-authors are Shirin D. Antia (lead author, University of Arizona), Amy R. Lederberg (Georgia State University), Susan Easterbrooks (Georgie State University), Brenda Schick (University of Colorado at Boulder), Lee Branum-Martin (Georgia State University), and Mi-Young Webb (Georgia State University).

Connor's research focuses on examining the links between children’s language, cognitive, social-emotional, and literacy and mathematics development from preschool through the elementary grades. She currently is the principal investigator conducting a series of basic research studies and randomized controlled field trials investigating the reasons children fail to achieve proficient reading comprehension and math skills and the causal implications of child-by-instruction interaction effects on student achievement 

Abstract

This study examined the language and reading progress of 336 young DHH children in kindergarten, first and second grades. Trained assessors tested children’s language, reading, and spoken and finger-spelled phonological awareness in the fall and spring of the school year. Children were divided into groups based on their auditory access and classroom communication: a spoken-only group (n = 101), a sign-only group (n = 131), and a bimodal group (n = 104). Overall, children showed delays in language and reading compared to norms established for hearing children. For language, vocabulary standard scores were higher than for English syntax. Although delayed in language, children made expected gains based on hearing norms from kindergarten to second grade. Reading scores declined from kindergarten to second grade. Spoken-only and bimodal children had similar word reading and reading comprehension abilities and higher scores than sign-only children. Spoken-only children had better spoken phonological awareness and nonword reading skills than the other two groups. The sign-only and bimodal groups made similar and significant gains in ASL syntax and fingerspelling phonological awareness.