Outcomes of cochlear implantation in deaf children of deaf parents.
This is a lot more interesting than it sounds:
“This study confirms that second-generation deaf children exceed deaf children of hearing parents in terms of cochlear implantation performance. Encouraging deaf children to communicate in sign language from a very early age, before cochlear implantation, appears to improve their ability to learn spoken language after cochlear implantation.”
See?! As illustrated in The Silent Child, and it isn't news, parents are sometimes told that encouraging sign language will adversely effect the development of other languages like spoken English. This is counter-intuitive as much as it is simply and demonstrably wrong, and this paper demonstrates it very elegantly:
“Both groups of children showed auditory and speech development. However, the second-generation deaf children (i.e. deaf children of deaf parents) exceeded the cochlear implantation performance of the deaf children with hearing parents.”
You can access the full journal article here.