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RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS
RESEARCH FINDS NEW EVIDENCE of visual learning differences between deaf and hearing children
Researchers at Keele University have found new evidence of how deaf infants and those with normal hearing process visual information differently during their early learning .
Infants and toddlers spend most of their waking hours actively exploring their environment , as they observe the world with fascination and experience the sights and sounds caused by their own actions , and these early sensory experiences help guide the normal development of social and cognitive skills . This means that children with hearing loss face unique communication and social challenges , and their performance across a range of general cognitive skills – including perception , attention and memory – is also affected .
The researchers are the first to study visual learning in similar aged infants and toddlers with and without hearing loss . They compared learning between deaf infants , toddlers who had no hearing but had received cochlear implants , and infants and toddlers with normal hearing .
Researchers tested how quickly infants and toddlers could learn a simple visual pattern , as learning patterns . This is what researchers call “ statistical ” learning , a crucial learning mechanism in early infancy that allows babies to start to understand their environment and is a building block for language .
Using eye-tracking , they found no evidence of learning in the deaf infants , who have had no meaningful experience with sound in their lives so far . All other participants — hearing infants , toddlers with cochlear implants , and hearing toddlers — have experienced some degree of access to auditory signals and all demonstrated learning . Toddlers with stronger visual learning also showed more advanced language development .