Volume II Issue Iv November 2010

Link for ASL Font http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-layout/gallaudettruetypefont.htm American Sign Language True Type font from Gallaudet to do the puzzle at the end of this newsletter!!!

Thanksgiving is this month and we will soon sit down to turkey and dressing with all the fixings. The traditional dessert is a pie to wrap up the meal so this month’s sign is pie.

PIE: Show the slicing of a pie. Make two slices in an imaginary pie on the palm of your left hand. The cuts should form a wedge of pie.

http://asluniversity.com/

The rate of hearing loss among American adolescents increased by about 30% between the periods 1988-1994 and 2005-2006, according to an article published in the August 18 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). In their study, Josef Shargorodsky, MD, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, and three co-authors compared data collected by the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III) in the earlier time period with data from NHANES IV, conducted about a decade later. There were 2928 participants aged 12 to 19 years in NHANES III and 1771 in the fourth national survey.

The JAMA article noted that 19.5% of the subjects in the later survey had a hearing loss, compared to 14.9% in the earlier study. Since NHANES surveys are nationally representative, that 19.5% figure suggests that about 6.5 million Americans in that age group have some degree of hearing loss. The authors defined hearing loss as slight if it was greater than 15 dB and less than 25 dB in the worse ear and as mild or greater if 25 dB or greater in the worse ear. Unilateral loss was somewhat more common than bilateral.

The NHAMES IV data did little to explain the reason for the growing frequency of teen hearing loss. For example, responses to survey questions about recurrent ear infections, firearm use, and extended exposure to loud noise showed no significant association with hearing loss in 2005-2006. However, the data did show that young people from families below the federal poverty threshold were significantly more at risk of hearing loss than those from non-poor families. The authors concluded by calling for further studies to determine reasons for the increase in teen hearing loss.


JAMA articles often draw a lot of attention, but this one proved especially popular with the media, perhaps because its alarming findings seemed to bolster the common perception that young people are destroying their ears with iPods and other MP3 players. As soon as the JAMA study went public, it began generating scores of web, print, and TV and radio reportsaround the world.

Many of the follow-up stories featured comments from experts not involved in the JAMA article. Especially popular with the media was Brian Fligor, PhD, director of diagnostic audiology at Children's Hospital in Boston, who appeared on the NBC and CBS evening news telecasts and was interviewed by USA Today. In his comments, Fligor warned people not to “blare” their iPods and also noted, “Because hearing loss is cumulative, these teens [who have mild losses now] are at high risk for significant hearing problems.”

Alison Grimes, AuD, manager of the audiology clinic at UCLA Medical Center, told Reuters that the findings had “potential implications in terms of children's learning."

http://journals.lww.com/thehearingjournal/blog/HearingHappenings/pages/post.aspx?PostID=91

First Longitudinal Study of Deaf Children to Dissect Reading

By Sarah D. Sparks on October 15, 2010 10:40 AM

Researchers at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., are recruiting students for an unprecedented longitudinal study of deaf children in the first stages of learning to read, in hopes of understanding stubborn sound-based reading difficulties. The researchers hope that the study will help educators improve reading not just for deaf students, but also for those with auditory dyslexia or with a preference for visual learning.

The Visual Language and Visual Learning Early Education Longitudinal Study (VL2 EELS) will track 600 deaf students ages 3-5 over three years. Donna A. Morere, clinical psychologist at Gallaudet, said the study will include both completely deaf students and those with some residual hearing, using both sign language and other language methods.

Deaf children as a group have serious and longstanding problems learning to read. An 18-year-old deaf student reads on average at a 3rd-grade level, about as well as an 8- to 9-year-old and only 40 percent of deaf college students read at or above the 8th-grade reading level, according to the Gallaudet Research Institute in Washington.

Those grim statistics have changed little since they were first identified in the 1970s, according to Morere. Research shows that most of the interventions used for hearing students with difficulty reading, such as phonics instruction and gleaning meaning of new words from context, don't work as well for deaf students. "Reading isn't a naturally developing process; you don't just sit a kid in front of a book one day and they start reading," Morere said. "Reading is an arbitrary symbol system that is generally mapped to spoken language."

The study is intended to provide data to help researchers identify the factors that affect whether a deaf child will develop literacy skills. Researchers will test students annually in a wide array of areas, including cognition, attention, English and sign language, memory, phoneme awareness, ability to name letters and objects, and print knowledge.

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If you have any questions please contact Heather Hall at or 606-439-1119 ex 41