There is an urgent need to support language rich environments for young deaf and hard of hearing children who are falling behind in language. The percentage of deaf children birth through five meeting age expectations decreased by 4 percentage points from fall to spring, a pattern indicative of falling farther behind on language benchmarks.
This pattern of decline from fall to spring occurs in both deaf infants and toddlers and deaf children three to five. We do not see this same decline from fall to spring for hard of hearing children or all other children birth to 5 with IFSPs and IEPs. This trend indicates that not all deaf children have access to language-rich social and education environments necessary to support their language acquisition and development.
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