Family ASL: An Early Start to Equitable Education for Deaf Children

Psychotherapy research in the deaf community: pilot clinical trial lessons learned

At the time of publication, there are no evidence-based psychotherapies to treat any behavioral health condition with Deaf clients. This article describes unique study design considerations for psychotherapy clinical trials conducted in the U.S. Deaf community. We synthesized emergent themes from participant exit interviews with feasibility data and real-life challenges that our team encountered when implementing the Signs of Safety pilot clinical trial, conducted from 2019 to 2022. Particularly illustrative participant accounts were selected to demonstrate five major lessons learned-expanding reach for recruitment; formally assessing participants' ASL fluency; selecting ethically-sound control groups; streamlining video fidelity monitoring; and making crystallized outcome assessments ASL-accessible. These lessons learned informed the design of the first-ever full-scale psychotherapy trial in the U.S. Deaf community, to be conducted from late autumn 2024 through 2028. This trial will potentially validate the first evidence-based therapy for Deaf people and provide a vital roadmap for conducting Deaf community-engaged clinical trials.

An approach designed to fail deaf children and their parents and how to change it

The matter of raising and educating deaf children has been caught up in percepts of development that are persistently inaccurate and at odds with scientific research. These percepts have negatively impacted the health and quality of life of deaf children and deaf people in general. The all too prevalent advice is to raise the child strictly orally and wait to see what happens. Only when the child is seriously behind is a completely accessible language - a sign language - introduced, and that is far too late for protecting cognitive health. The medical profession, along with others, needs to offer parents better advice and better supports so that neither the children nor their parents wait and watch as the oral-only method fails. All must take responsible action to assure an approach that succeeds.

Hearing parents learning American Sign Language with their deaf children: a mixed-methods survey

Hearing parents with deaf children face difficult decisions about what language(s) to use with their child. Sign languages such as American Sign Language (ASL) are fully accessible to deaf children, yet most hearing parents are not proficient in ASL prior to having a deaf child. Parents are often discouraged from learning ASL based in part on an assumption that it will be too difficult, yet there is little evidence supporting this claim. In this mixed-methods study, we surveyed hearing parents of deaf children (n = 100) who had learned ASL to learn more about their experiences. In their survey responses, parents identified a range of resources that supported their ASL learning as well as frequent barriers. Parents identified strongly with belief statements indicating the importance of ASL and affirmed that learning ASL is attainable for hearing parents. We discuss the implications of this study for parents who are considering ASL as a language choice and for the professionals who guide them.

Deaf Children Need Rich Language Input from the Start: Support in Advising Parents

Bilingual bimodalism is a great benefit to deaf children at home and in schooling. Deaf signing children perform better overall than non-signing deaf children, regardless of whether they use a cochlear implant. Raising a deaf child in a speech-only environment can carry cognitive and psycho-social risks that may have lifelong adverse effects. For children born deaf, or who become deaf in early childhood, we recommend comprehensible multimodal language exposure and engagement in joint activity with parents and friends to assure age-appropriate first-language acquisition. Accessible visual language input should begin as close to birth as possible. Hearing parents will need timely and extensive support; thus, we propose that, upon the birth of a deaf child and through the preschool years, among other things, the family needs an adult deaf presence in the home for several hours every day to be a linguistic model, to guide the family in taking sign language lessons, to show the family how to make spoken language accessible to their deaf child, and to be an encouraging liaison to deaf communities. While such a support program will be complicated and challenging to implement, it is far less costly than the harm of linguistic deprivation.

Lessons to be Learned from Bimodal Bilingualism

This article presents a selective overview of topics related to the language experience of early bimodal bilinguals - individuals who are raised from an early age using two languages from two different modalities, typically spoken (or written) and signed. We show that deaf and hearing bimodal bilinguals may display patterns of bilingualism that are similar to unimodal bilinguals in some ways, such as the use of both languages in a single situation or even a single utterance. Nevertheless, there are also differences between bimodal and unimodal bilinguals, and differences among different subgroups of bimodal bilinguals, given large variation in relative access to the dominant and minority language(s) in their environment and their differential experiences in schooling and interactions with potential interlocutors. Moreover, we review studies discussing potential advantages of the sign modality and advantages of bilingualism in this population. We hope to highlight the importance of considering children's overall language experience, including the age(s) at which they are exposed to each of their languages, the richness of their experiences with each of the languages, and the ways that the language-learning experience may contribute to the child's linguistic and cognitive development.