UEA launching a £1 million project to help and support deaf children
They be working with deaf babies and toddlers, as part of a four year project
Researchers at the University of East Anglia are launching a £1 million project to understand how to best support language development for deaf children with hearing parents.
The UEA team will be working with deaf babies and toddlers, as part of a four year programme, to develop new ways of tracking the impact that reduced access to language may have on their cognitive development over the first two years of their lives.
The work's been commissioned as many deaf children born to hearing parents often have reduced access to language and start school with poorer language skills and learning outcomes compared to their hearing peers.
“One child in every 1,000 is born deaf"
Lead researcher Dr Teodora Gliga, from UEA’s School of Psychology, said: “We want to better understand how access to language shapes early cognitive development.
“One child in every 1,000 is born deaf, and the vast majority of these children are born to hearing parents.
“Most hearing parents use a spoken language as their primary language which is at least partially inaccessible to their deaf child. Deaf parents however use sign language, which is fully accessible to the child.
“Many deaf infants born to hearing parents will experience reduced access to the main language used by their family.
“And while many families choose for their children to have a cochlear implant, many deaf children still enter school with less developed language and learning outcomes compared to their hearing peers.
“We want to better understand the large variation in communicative development and school readiness of deaf children born to hearing parents.”
What will this all involve?
The research will be led by UEA in collaboration with Goldsmiths, University of London, and Birkbeck, University of London.
It will involve neuroimaging methods such as electroencephalography and eye tracking to determine how pre-verbal children’s brains respond to images of familiar or unfamiliar categories.
As well as utilising UEA’s bespoke Developmental Dynamics Lab, the team have partnered with Norwich Castle Museum to carry out tests in a ‘real-world’ setting where the children will be learning as they move around the museum’s immersive galleries.