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Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children are often reported to show deficits on working memory (WM) tasks. These deficits are often characterized as contributing to their struggles to acquire spoken language. Here we report a longitudinal study of a large (N = 103) sample of DHH children who acquired American Sign Language (ASL) as their first language. Using an n-back working memory task, we show significant growth in WM performance across the 7–13-year-old age range. Furthermore, we show that children with early access to ASL from their DHH parents demonstrate faster WM growth and that this group difference is mediated by ASL receptive skills. The data suggest the important role of early access to perceivable natural language in promoting typical WM growth during the middle school years. We conclude that the acquisition of a natural visual–gestural language is sufficient to support the development of WM in DHH children. Further research is required to determine how the timing and quality of ASL exposure may play a role, or whether the effects are driven by acquisition-related corollaries, such as parent–child interactions and maternal stress. 

There is an ongoing debate in the field of early intervention and deaf education about the differences in executive functions between deaf and nondeaf children and what might give rise to them (Hall, 2020; Kronenberger & Pisoni, 2020; Morgan & Dye, 2020). Executive functions encompass cognitive abilities that allow a child to successfully perform tasks by planning and organizing their actions, and by maintaining focus on their goals and avoiding distraction (for a review see Diamond, 2013). Executive functions include a range of abilities, often studied in isolation, such as working memory (Baddeley, 2012), inhibition (Bari & Robbins, 2013), and sustained attention (Fisher, 2019). Studies of deaf children from nondeaf families 2 who have received a cochlear implant have reported deficits and large variability in outcomes for a number of these executive functions (Castellanos, Pisoni, Kronenberger, and Beer, 2016; Kronenberger, Beer, Castellanos, Pisoni, and Miyamoto (2014); Lyxell, Sahlén, Wass, Ibertsson, Larsby, Hällgren, & Mäki-Torkko, 2008; Quittner, Barker, Snell, Cruz, McDonald, Grimley, Botteri, Marciel, & CDaCI Investigative Team, 2007). Several different proposals have been put forward to explain the large degree of variability in this population of children. Those proposals differ in what they see as the optimal approach to early intervention and/or remediation of executive function. Some argue that rehabilitation of hearing loss is the best approach (Kral, Kronenberger, Pisoni, & O’Donoghue, 2016), others that establishing healthy communication between caregiver and child is critical (Morgan & Dye, 2020), and yet others that early exposure to and acquisition of a natural sign language is the best approach (Hall, 2020). In this chapter we will focus on just one of the executive functions – sustained attention – and use that (a) to explore the evidence for and against different approaches, and (b) to consider how some of those approaches interpret data based upon what we claim is an audiocentric perspective that fails to acknowledge or appreciate the experience and authority of deaf people. 

Abstract The auditory scaffolding hypothesis states that early experience with sound underpins the development of domain-general sequence processing abilities, supported by studies observing impaired sequence processing in deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) children. To test this hypothesis, we administered a sequence processing task to 77 DHH children who use American Sign Language (ASL) and 23 hearing monolingual children aged 7–12 years and found no performance difference between them after controlling for age and nonverbal intelligence. Additionally, neither spoken language comprehension scores nor hearing loss levels predicted sequence processing scores in the DHH group, whereas ASL comprehension scores did. Our results do not indicate sequence processing deficits in DHH children and do not support the auditory scaffolding hypothesis; instead, these findings suggest that factors related to experience with and/or proficiency in an accessible language during development may be more important determinants of sequence processing abilities.