Deaf and hard-of-hearing Multilingual Learners (DMLs) are Deaf and hard-of-hearing students who are either born outside of the country they currently receive schooling in or have both parents born outside of that country, using a language other than the national spoken language at home. This group is growing in numbers and contributes significantly to the increasing linguistic and cultural diversity in Deaf education. This systematic review synthesizes findings from 17 peer-reviewed empirical studies, identifying four educational levels relevant to DMLs: context, organization, educators, and student. Parents are key agents across all levels. While DML education generally aligns with that of other deaf and hard-of-hearing students, educators attest to difficulties teaching DMLs due to a lack of adequate assessments, strategies, and materials, adapted to DMLs’ specific needs. Educators and parents highlight difficulties in establishing effective home–school collaboration, despite its recognized importance for academic success. DMLs value all their languages equally but especially emphasize the national sign language for learning. Parents are an underused resource. This review underlines the pressing need for empirical research on effective teaching strategies and materials for DMLs, improved internal and external school collaboration strategies, and a deeper understanding of DMLs’ experience.

Infant-directed speech (IDS) is characterized by a range of register-typical characteristics. Many of those can be objectively measured, such as acoustic-prosodic and structural-linguistic modifications. Perceived vocal affect, however, is a socio-emotional IDS characteristic and is subjectively assessed. Vocal affect goes beyond acoustic-prosodic and structural-linguistic IDS features and includes a perceptive-subjective component in the listener. This study describes vocal affect valence in Swedish IDS during the first year of life, and compares vocal affect between mothers’ and fathers’ IDS and their adult-directed speech. Adult native speakers of Swedish (N = 16) rated affect valence in low-pass filtered IDS samples from free play interactions of mothers with infants at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months (N = 10) and fathers with their 12-month-olds (N = 6). Across the first year, the trajectory of mothers’ positive affect in Swedish IDS shows the highest affect scores toward the youngest infants and the lowest at 9 months of age. This follows a pattern comparable to that in Australian English IDS, showing that mothers express vocal affect similarly across different languages and cultures. Both mothers’ and fathers’ IDS to 12-month-olds have higher positive vocal affect valence than their adult-directed speech. There was no difference in positive affect valence between mothers’ and fathers’ IDS, that is, mothers and fathers express vocal affect to the same extent when talking to their infants. In conclusion, the findings of this study indicate that high positive vocal affect characterizes IDS across different languages and speakers.

The developmental trajectories of tone perception among tone and non-tone language learning infants have received wide attention and discussion in recent decades under the perceptual attunement framework. Nevertheless, tone perception in infants from pitch accent and bilingual language backgrounds has not been well understood. The present study examined monolingual and bilingual Norwegian-learning infants’ discrimination of two Cantonese tone contrasts at 5 and 10 months, ages corresponding to the onset and offset of perceptual attunement. Results showed that while monolingual infants were sensitive to the salient contrast, bilingual infants showed sensitivity to both contrasts at 10 months. In sum, infant age and bilingual language background affected discrimination. Pitch accent language experience or contrast salience may also play a role. The finding that early bilingual experience facilitated tone perception is of particular interest. It suggests that infant perception could be enhanced by a more complex linguistic environment on a broader level. As this was observed only at 10 months, cumulative exposure may be required for infants in a complex bilingual environment. Future studies should disambiguate explanations generated from the current finding, ranging from neurocognitive plasticity to perceptual salience, and from experience-dependent to independent possibilities.

We report the findings of a multi-language and multi-lab investigation of young infants’ ability to discriminate lexical tones as a function of their native language, age and language experience, as well as of tone properties. Given the high prevalence of lexical tones across human languages, understanding lexical tone acquisition is fundamental for comprehensive theories of language learning. While there are some similarities between the developmental course of lexical tone perception and that of vowels and consonants, findings for lexical tones tend to vary greatly across different laboratories. To reconcile these differences and to assess the developmental trajectory of native and non-native perception of tone contrasts, this study employed a single experimental paradigm with the same two pairs of Cantonese tone contrasts (perceptually similar vs. distinct) across 13 laboratories in Asia-Pacific, Europe and North-America testing 5-, 10- and 17-month-old monolingual (tone, pitch-accent, non-tone) and bilingual (tone/non-tone, non-tone/non-tone) infants. Across the age range and language backgrounds, infants who were not exposed to Cantonese showed robust discrimination of the two non-native lexical tone contrasts. Contrary to this overall finding, the statistical model assessing native discrimination by Cantonese-learning infants failed to yield significant effects. These findings indicate that lexical tone sensitivity is maintained from 5 to 17 months in infants acquiring tone and non-tone languages, challenging the generalisability of the existing theoretical accounts of perceptual narrowing in the first months of life.

Language is a universal human ability, acquired readily by young children, who otherwise struggle with many basics of survival. And yet, language ability is variable across individuals. Naturalistic and experimental observations suggest that children’s linguistic skills vary with factors like socioeconomic status and children’s gender. But which factors really influence children’s day-to-day language use? Here, we leverage speech technology in a big-data approach to report on a unique cross-cultural and diverse data set: >2,500 d-long, child-centered audio-recordings of 1,001 2- to 48-mo-olds from 12 countries spanning six continents across urban, farmer-forager, and subsistence-farming contexts. As expected, age and language-relevant clinical risks and diagnoses predicted how much speech (and speech-like vocalization) children produced. Critically, so too did adult talk in children’s environments: Children who heard more talk from adults produced more speech. In contrast to previous conclusions based on more limited sampling methods and a different set of language proxies, socioeconomic status (operationalized as maternal education) was not significantly associated with children’s productions over the first 4y of life, and neither were gender or multilingualism. These findings from large-scale naturalistic data advance our understanding of which factors are robust predictors of variability in the speech behaviors of young learners in a wide range of everyday contexts.

Harnessing a global sample of >40,000 h of child-centered audio capturing young children’s home environment, we measured contributors to how much speech 0- to 4-y-olds naturally produce. Amount of adult talk, age, and normative development were the sole significant predictors; child gender, socioeconomic status, and multilingualism did not explain how often children vocalized or how much adult talk they heard. These findings (strengthened by our validation of existing automated speech algorithms) open up interesting conversations regarding early language development to the broader public, including parents, clinicians, educators, and policymakers. The factors explaining variance also inform our understanding of humans’ unique capacity for learning and potentially large-scale applications of machine technology to everyday human behavior.

Ausgehend von der Rolle der Anamnese in der Verhaltenstherapie werden die Anamnesefragebögen für Kinder und Jugendliche innerhalb des Verhaltensdiagnostiksystems VDS samt ihrer theoretischen Verankerung vorgestellt.Es werden Inhalt und Struktur sämtlicher VDS1-KJ Bögen präsentiert, die neben einem Basisbogen in Zusatzbögen für Säuglinge und Kleinkinder, Kinder im Kindergartenalter, Kinder im Grundschulalter und Kinder im Schul- und Jugendalter gegliedert sind und zusätzlich zur Fremdanamnese durch die Erziehungsberechtigten für Kinder und Jugendliche an weiterführenden Schulen auch einen Eigenanamnesebogen enthalten, der mit Hilfe eines Fallbeispiels illustriert wird. 

Based on the role of the anamnesis in behavioral therapy, the anamnesis questionnaires for children and adolescents within the behavioral diagnostics system (VDS) are presented together with their theoretical anchoring. The content and structure of all VDS1-KJ sheets are presented, which, in addition to a basic sheet, are divided into additional sheets for infants and toddlers, children of kindergarten age, children of primary school age, and children of school and youth age and, in addition to the third-party anamnesis by the legal guardians, also one Self-anamnesis questionnaire for children and young people in secondary schools, illustrated with a case study. 

The amplitude of the event-related N1 wave decreases with repeated stimulation. This repetition-attenuation has not previously been investigated in response to variable auditory stimuli, nor has the relative impact of acoustic vs. perceptual category repetition been studied. In the present study, N1 repetition-attenuation was investigated for speech and spectrally rotated speech with varying degrees of acoustic and perceptual category variation. In the speech condition, participants (n = 19) listened to stimulus trains consisting of either the same vowel exemplar (no variability condition), different exemplars of the same vowel (low variability condition), or different exemplars of two different vowels (high variability condition). In the rotated speech condition, the spectrally rotated counterparts of the vowels were presented. Findings show N1 repetition-attenuation in the face of acoustic and perceptual category variability, but no impact of the degree of variability on the degree of N1 attenuation. Speech stimuli resulted in less attenuation than the acoustically matched non-speech stimuli, which is in line with previous findings. It remains unclear if the attenuation of the N1 wave is reduced as a result of stimuli being perceived as belonging to perceptual categories or as a result of some other characteristic of speech.

During the first year of life, infants shift their focus in speech perception from acoustic to linguistic information. This perceptual reorganization is related to exposure, and a direct relation has previously been demonstrated between amount of daily language exposure and mismatch response (MMR) amplitude to a native consonant contrast at around one year of age. The present study investigates the same relation between amount of speech exposure and MMR amplitude to a native vowel contrast at four to eight months of age. Importantly, the present study uses spectrally rotated speech in an effort to take general neural maturation into account. The amplitude of the part of the MMR that is tied specifically to speech processing correlates with amount of daily speech exposure, as estimated using the LENA system.