Cochlear implants: the young people's perspective.

Cochlear implantation is a relatively new procedure, which has already had significant impact on the lives of many profoundly deaf children and adults, in providing useful hearing to those unable to benefit significantly from hearing aids. After 16 years of cochlear implantation in the United Kingdom, there is now a body of evidence covering a range of outcomes, much of which covers perceptual and linguistic outcomes. This study looks at the impact of cochlear implantation on a group of 29 young people aged 13-16 years, using a semistructured questionnaire. It examines issues from the perspective of the young people themselves, including their understanding of and degree of satisfaction with the way their implant works for them, their social and communication abilities and choices, their educational challenges, and their identity. It concludes that the young people in this group feel positive toward their cochlear implants and the decisions made on their behalf by parents. Many have a flexible attitude to communication modes and an identity which is not fixed in terms of conventional descriptors.

Informed choice and deaf children: underpinning concepts and enduring challenges.

This article concerns the first stage of a research and development project that aimed to produce both parent and professional guidelines on the promotion and provision of informed choice for families with deaf children. It begins with a theoretical discussion of the problems associated with the concept of informed choice and deaf child services and then focuses specifically on why a metastudy approach was employed to address both the overcontextualized debate about informed choice when applied to deaf children and the problems associated with its investigation in practice with families and professionals. It presents a detailed analysis of the conceptual relevance of a range of identified studies "outside" the field of deafness. These are ordered according to 2 main conceptual categories and 7 subcategories-(a) the nature of information: "information that is evaluative, not just descriptive"; "the difficulties of information for a purpose"; "the origins and status of information"; and "informed choice and knowledge, not informed choice and information" and (b) parameters and definitions of choice: "informed choice as absolute and relative concept", "preferences and presumptions of rationality", and "informed choice for whom?" Relevant deaf child literature is integrated into the discussion of each conceptual debate in order both to expand and challenge current usage of informed choice as applied to deaf children and families and to delineate possible directions in the planning of the next stage of the main project aimed at producing parent/professional guidelines.

Children's grammatical categories of verb and noun: a comparative look at children with specific language impairment (SLI) and normal language (NL).

The study investigated the development of grammatical categories (noun and verb) in young language learners. Twenty-eight children with specific language impairment (SLI) with a mean language age of 35 months and 28 children with normal language (NL) with a mean language age of 34 months were exposed to four novel verbs and four novel nouns during 10 experimental child-directed play sessions. The lexical items were modelled with four experimentally controlled argument structures. Both groups of children showed little productivity with syntactic marking of arguments in the novel verb conditions. Thus, both groups of children mostly followed the surface structure of the model presented to them, regardless of the argument they were trying to express. Therefore, there was little evidence of verb-general processes. In contrast, both groups used nouns in semantic roles that had not been modelled for them. Importantly, however, children with SLI still appeared to be more input dependent than NL children. This suggests that children with NL were working with a robust noun schema, whereas children with SLI were not. Taken together, the findings suggest that neither group of children had a grammatical category of verb, but demonstrated a general knowledge of the grammatical category of noun. These findings are discussed in relation to current theories of normal and impaired language development.