Overview

The proposed research addresses a long-standing and important challenge of improving literacy skills of children who are deaf and hard of hearing, a historically under researched group. The investigators aim to leverage shape coding - an empirically validated intervention approach for constructing sentences in spoken English - for improving how efficiently children who are deaf and hard of hearing learn to correctly construct sentences in written English. To advance the promising yet underutilized research on shape coding, the investigators complete the next logical step of applying the visual supports provided with shape coding to written language for deaf and hard of hearing children. Shape coding has been effective for teaching sentence structure in spoken English to children with language disabilities and has recently been applied to sentence structure in American Sign Language with deaf and hard of hearing children. Intervention involving shape coding is predicted to result in increased accuracy of word order in sentences in written English because deaf and hard of hearing children often benefit from visual information. The investigators will accomplish this aim using single case multiple probe across participants design studies with 30 fifth through eighth grade children who are deaf and hard of hearing. The knowledge gained will guide language and literacy intervention for children who are deaf and hard of hearing.

Eligibility

Inclusion Criteria:

• Children in grades five through eight
• deaf or hard of hearing
• use spoken English and American Sign Language (ASL)
• bilateral hearing loss
• the ability to read and understand the grammatical structures of interest
• already be writing sentences, but demonstrate errors in word order and/or grammar.

Exclusion Criteria:

• diagnosis of dyslexia
• uncorrected vision impairment (i.e., identified vision loss without use of corrective lenses that interferes with eligibility evaluation tasks)
• evidence of severe motor impairment (i.e., insufficient motor skills to complete eligibility evaluation tasks independently).