My research is focused on language and literacy development of deaf children. Recent research projects include (1) the development of a new curriculum, called Foundations for Literacy with an interdisciplinary team of researchers and teachers. Foundations is an intervention program designed to teach alphabetic knowledge, phonological awareness, and vocabulary to deaf prekindergarteners (funded by IES) and (2) an examination of rapid word learning abilities of preschoolers (funded by the US Department of Education.) I am also co-Training Director of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) Post-Doctoral Research Training in Language and Literacy with Special Populations Program. Phone: 4044138313
Deaf children with hearing parents are born into a world without language. This nonverbal environ... more Deaf children with hearing parents are born into a world without language. This nonverbal environment is sufficient for the development of the cognitive basis of language (joint attention and nonlinguistic communication dialogues), but not language itself. Even after hearing loss is identified and there is improved access to language, deaf children show multiple linguistic deficits. Although there are wide individual differences, deaf children and adolescents have delayed and slow vocabulary development and poor syntactic knowledge, especially in the areas of morphosyntax and complex sentences. Such problems result from restricted linguistic input and early language deprivation. Recent advances such as universal newborn hearing screening, cochlear implants, and improved intervention programs hold promise for improving the linguistic sequelae of deafness.
Page 106. I VOCABULARY DEVELOPMENT OF DEAF AND HARD OF HEARING CHILDREN Amy R. Lederberg and Patr... more Page 106. I VOCABULARY DEVELOPMENT OF DEAF AND HARD OF HEARING CHILDREN Amy R. Lederberg and Patricia E. Spencer There has been an explosion of research on early vocabulary development of hearing ...
5 Impact of Child Deafness on Mother-Toddler Interaction: Strengths and Weaknesses Amy R. Lederbe... more 5 Impact of Child Deafness on Mother-Toddler Interaction: Strengths and Weaknesses Amy R. Lederberg Amy K. Prezbindowski Georgia State ... dyads spent less time compared to Hh dyads in coordinated joint attention by 18 months.) Prezbindowski, Adamson, and Lederberg ...
Literacy intervention research tests our best ideas about instruction and forges a pathway forwar... more Literacy intervention research tests our best ideas about instruction and forges a pathway forward toward deeper and more nuanced understandings of how children think, communicate, and learn. This chapter describes the components of the development of literacy interventions, explaining how to construct and evaluate each component in sequence to generate robust, reliable evidence for practice. In doing so, the chapter discusses some of the specific contexts of, and challenges for, literacy intervention research in deaf education. In order to illustrate important considerations for designing and interpreting literacy intervention studies in this context, two case studies of interventions developed or applied with deaf and hard-of-hearing children are included.
Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, Sep 9, 2020
The Center on Literacy and Deafness examined the language and reading progress of 336 young deaf ... more The Center on Literacy and Deafness examined the language and reading progress of 336 young deaf and hard-of-hearing children in kindergarten, first and second grades on a series of tests of language, reading, and spoken and fingerspelled 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). Previous work reports the overall data (Antia, S., Lederberg, A., Schick, B., Branum-Martin, L., Connor, C. M., & Webb, M. (2020a). Language and reading progress of young DHH children. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, (3), 25; Lederberg, A. R., Branum-Martin, L., Webb, M. L., Schick, B., Antia, S., Easterbrooks, S. R., & Connor, C. M. (2019). Modality and interrelations among language, reading, spoken phonological awareness, and fingerspelling. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 24(4), 408–423). This report presents an in-depth look at the reading fluency of the participants measured along multiple dimensions. In general, 43% of the participants were unable to read fluently and an additional 23% were unable to read fluently at grade level. Rate and accuracy, rate of growth, miscue analysis, and self-corrections differed by communication modality. Most notably, children demonstrated limited strategies for self-correction during reading fluency tasks.
Despite the fact that children’s word reading and spelling skills are crucial for developing text... more Despite the fact that children’s word reading and spelling skills are crucial for developing text-level comprehension and composition, little is known about what teachers do in classrooms to promote deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students’ learning of word reading and spelling. This observational study examined strategies teachers of DHH students used when teaching word reading and spelling to DHH students who used spoken English. One day of language arts instruction in 23 kindergartens through second-grade classrooms was observed. Teachers’ word-level instruction was coded. Results indicated that teachers spent substantially more time on word-level instruction during decoding and encoding contexts than they did during text reading and writing contexts. In addition, differences were found in teachers’ use of strategies depending on the instructional contexts. Teachers utilized phonological strategies considerably more frequently than any other strategy in their word-level instruction.
Studies have shown the benefits of fingerspelling on literacy skills in school-age deaf and hard-... more Studies have shown the benefits of fingerspelling on literacy skills in school-age deaf and hard-of-hearing students. This study is an observation of 20 first- and second-grade classrooms. The classroom observations were coded for fingerspelling event frequency, type, length, and whether it was chained to print. The observations showed that teachers used an average of 54 fingerspelled events during 40-min lessons. Teachers’ frequency of fingerspelling was positively related to students’ frequency of fingerspelling. The types of words fingerspelled included Vocabulary (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs), Function (prepositions, articles, and conjunctions), Abbreviations, and Single Letter Names (i.e., manual alphabet). Teachers most frequently fingerspelled Vocabulary words (57.9%, SD = 22.1%) followed by Function words (15%, SD = 11.2%). The average length of Vocabulary and Function words were 4.2 (SD = 0.7) and 2.9 (SD = 1.1) letters, respectively. Teachers chained fingerspelli...
The Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 2020
Bilingual education programs for deaf children have long asserted that American Sign Language (AS... more Bilingual education programs for deaf children have long asserted that American Sign Language (ASL) is a better language of instruction English-like signing because ASL is a natural language. However, English-like signing may be a useful bridge to reading English. In the present study, we tested 32 deaf children between third and sixth grade to assess their capacity to use ASL or English-like signing in nine different languages and reading tasks. Our results found that there was no significant difference in the deaf children’s ability to comprehend narratives in ASL compared to when they are told in English-like signing. Additionally, language abilities in ASL and English-like signing were strongly related to each other and to reading. Reading was also strongly related to fingerspelling. Our results suggest that there may be a role in literacy instruction for English-like signing as a supplement to ASL in deaf bilingual schools.
Page 135. Critical periods in the acquisition of lexical skills Evidence from deaf individuals Am... more Page 135. Critical periods in the acquisition of lexical skills Evidence from deaf individuals Amy R. Lederberg and Patricia E. Spencer i. Introduction The speed with which young children acquire language is one of the most re-markable feats of early childhood. ...
Deaf children with hearing parents are born into a world without language. This nonverbal environ... more Deaf children with hearing parents are born into a world without language. This nonverbal environment is sufficient for the development of the cognitive basis of language (joint attention and nonlinguistic communication dialogues), but not language itself. Even after hearing loss is identified and there is improved access to language, deaf children show multiple linguistic deficits. Although there are wide individual differences, deaf children and adolescents have delayed and slow vocabulary development and poor syntactic knowledge, especially in the areas of morphosyntax and complex sentences. Such problems result from restricted linguistic input and early language deprivation. Recent advances such as universal newborn hearing screening, cochlear implants, and improved intervention programs hold promise for improving the linguistic sequelae of deafness.
Page 106. I VOCABULARY DEVELOPMENT OF DEAF AND HARD OF HEARING CHILDREN Amy R. Lederberg and Patr... more Page 106. I VOCABULARY DEVELOPMENT OF DEAF AND HARD OF HEARING CHILDREN Amy R. Lederberg and Patricia E. Spencer There has been an explosion of research on early vocabulary development of hearing ...
5 Impact of Child Deafness on Mother-Toddler Interaction: Strengths and Weaknesses Amy R. Lederbe... more 5 Impact of Child Deafness on Mother-Toddler Interaction: Strengths and Weaknesses Amy R. Lederberg Amy K. Prezbindowski Georgia State ... dyads spent less time compared to Hh dyads in coordinated joint attention by 18 months.) Prezbindowski, Adamson, and Lederberg ...
Literacy intervention research tests our best ideas about instruction and forges a pathway forwar... more Literacy intervention research tests our best ideas about instruction and forges a pathway forward toward deeper and more nuanced understandings of how children think, communicate, and learn. This chapter describes the components of the development of literacy interventions, explaining how to construct and evaluate each component in sequence to generate robust, reliable evidence for practice. In doing so, the chapter discusses some of the specific contexts of, and challenges for, literacy intervention research in deaf education. In order to illustrate important considerations for designing and interpreting literacy intervention studies in this context, two case studies of interventions developed or applied with deaf and hard-of-hearing children are included.
Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, Sep 9, 2020
The Center on Literacy and Deafness examined the language and reading progress of 336 young deaf ... more The Center on Literacy and Deafness examined the language and reading progress of 336 young deaf and hard-of-hearing children in kindergarten, first and second grades on a series of tests of language, reading, and spoken and fingerspelled 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). Previous work reports the overall data (Antia, S., Lederberg, A., Schick, B., Branum-Martin, L., Connor, C. M., & Webb, M. (2020a). Language and reading progress of young DHH children. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, (3), 25; Lederberg, A. R., Branum-Martin, L., Webb, M. L., Schick, B., Antia, S., Easterbrooks, S. R., & Connor, C. M. (2019). Modality and interrelations among language, reading, spoken phonological awareness, and fingerspelling. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 24(4), 408–423). This report presents an in-depth look at the reading fluency of the participants measured along multiple dimensions. In general, 43% of the participants were unable to read fluently and an additional 23% were unable to read fluently at grade level. Rate and accuracy, rate of growth, miscue analysis, and self-corrections differed by communication modality. Most notably, children demonstrated limited strategies for self-correction during reading fluency tasks.
Despite the fact that children’s word reading and spelling skills are crucial for developing text... more Despite the fact that children’s word reading and spelling skills are crucial for developing text-level comprehension and composition, little is known about what teachers do in classrooms to promote deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students’ learning of word reading and spelling. This observational study examined strategies teachers of DHH students used when teaching word reading and spelling to DHH students who used spoken English. One day of language arts instruction in 23 kindergartens through second-grade classrooms was observed. Teachers’ word-level instruction was coded. Results indicated that teachers spent substantially more time on word-level instruction during decoding and encoding contexts than they did during text reading and writing contexts. In addition, differences were found in teachers’ use of strategies depending on the instructional contexts. Teachers utilized phonological strategies considerably more frequently than any other strategy in their word-level instruction.
Studies have shown the benefits of fingerspelling on literacy skills in school-age deaf and hard-... more Studies have shown the benefits of fingerspelling on literacy skills in school-age deaf and hard-of-hearing students. This study is an observation of 20 first- and second-grade classrooms. The classroom observations were coded for fingerspelling event frequency, type, length, and whether it was chained to print. The observations showed that teachers used an average of 54 fingerspelled events during 40-min lessons. Teachers’ frequency of fingerspelling was positively related to students’ frequency of fingerspelling. The types of words fingerspelled included Vocabulary (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs), Function (prepositions, articles, and conjunctions), Abbreviations, and Single Letter Names (i.e., manual alphabet). Teachers most frequently fingerspelled Vocabulary words (57.9%, SD = 22.1%) followed by Function words (15%, SD = 11.2%). The average length of Vocabulary and Function words were 4.2 (SD = 0.7) and 2.9 (SD = 1.1) letters, respectively. Teachers chained fingerspelli...
The Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 2020
Bilingual education programs for deaf children have long asserted that American Sign Language (AS... more Bilingual education programs for deaf children have long asserted that American Sign Language (ASL) is a better language of instruction English-like signing because ASL is a natural language. However, English-like signing may be a useful bridge to reading English. In the present study, we tested 32 deaf children between third and sixth grade to assess their capacity to use ASL or English-like signing in nine different languages and reading tasks. Our results found that there was no significant difference in the deaf children’s ability to comprehend narratives in ASL compared to when they are told in English-like signing. Additionally, language abilities in ASL and English-like signing were strongly related to each other and to reading. Reading was also strongly related to fingerspelling. Our results suggest that there may be a role in literacy instruction for English-like signing as a supplement to ASL in deaf bilingual schools.
Page 135. Critical periods in the acquisition of lexical skills Evidence from deaf individuals Am... more Page 135. Critical periods in the acquisition of lexical skills Evidence from deaf individuals Amy R. Lederberg and Patricia E. Spencer i. Introduction The speed with which young children acquire language is one of the most re-markable feats of early childhood. ...
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