Deaf Health Review

The “intersectionality of identities” is the idea that we all belong to multiple groups at once based on characteristics such as our age, race, gender and the presence of disabilities. Being a senior and being a member of the Deaf community have separately been shown to have an important impact on one's health, but what does the literature say about people who are both? Lesch et al. conducted a review of the literature and found that obstacles to healthcare were common for this group, including: Like younger Deaf, the elderly Deaf experience difficulty in making appointments, with the added burden of an increasing number and severity of healthcare issues Lack of providers who will accept Medicaid and Medicare insurance Lack of validated tests to assess the cognitive function of Deaf patients Lack of healthcare providers with competence in communicating with Deaf patients and understanding Deaf culture Lack of shared understanding around end of life decisions between healthca...

Analogical reasoning has been postulated to be the root of all learning. Past research has shown that Deaf children lag behind their hearing counterparts in analogical reasoning. However, these studies have usually been conducted in the researcher's written or spoken language. Henner et al. sought to test the analogical reasoning ability of Deaf children when tested in ASL. Their participants were 267 children aged 8-18 who lived in residential schools for the Deaf. They were asked to complete "A is to B as C is to what?" type questions (e.g., microwave : kitchen :: car : what?). The directions and all testing was conducted using signing. The results showed that analogical reasoning ability was dependent on the participant's age and ASL status (native signers, defined for this study as having at least one Deaf parent, did significantly better than children whose parents were both hearing). However, ASL vocabulary and syntactic ability were more important predicto...