Child Development, July/August 2009, Volume 80, Number 4, Pages 952–967

Developmental Social Cognitive Neuroscience: Insights From Deafness

David Corina Jenny Singleton
University of California, Davis University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign

The condition of deafness presents a developmental context that provides insight into the biological, cultural,
and linguistic factors underlying the development of neural systems that impact social cognition. Studies of
visual attention, behavioral regulation, language development, and face and human action perception are
discussed. Visually based culture and language provides deaf children with affordances that promote
resiliency and optimization in their development of visual engagement, executive functions, and theory of
mind. These experiences promote neural adaptations permitting nuanced perception of classes of linguistic
and emotional-social behaviors. Studies of deafness provide examples of how interactions and contributions
of biological predispositions and genetic phenotypes with environmental and cultural factors including child-
hood experiences and actions of caregivers shape developmental trajectories (M. I. Posner & M. K. Rothbart,
2007).

The field of social cognitive neuroscience has been
instrumental in bridging formal psychological con-
structs derived from social psychology with emerg-
ing understanding of neurofunctional properties of
the human brain. Growing evidence from this work
supports the notion of specialized neural regions
that are preferentially involved in the processing of
social information. As social phenomena inherently
cuts a broad path through human experience, rang-
ing from understanding oneself to the appreciation
of and interactions with others, it should not be
surprising that the neural systems implicated in the
mediation of social behaviors are multipurpose and
highly intertwined with more basic sensory-percep-
tual, emotional, linguistic, and cognitive compo-
nents (Beer & Ochsner, 2006; Lieberman, 2006).
In the quest to understand these neural systems,
recent work has begun to explore their develop-
ment, striving to explicate the interactions and con-
tributions of biological predispositions and genetic
phenotypes with environmental and cultural factors
including childhood experiences and actions of
This work is supported by National Science Foundation (NSF)
Grant SBE-0541953 awarded to Gallaudet University and sup-
ports Drs. Corina and Singleton and National Institutes of
Health–National Institute on Deafness and Other Communica-
tion Disorders Grant 2ROI-DC03099 to D. Corina. We thank
Mary C. Mendoza for her help in the preparation of this manu-
script.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed
to David Corina, NSF Science of Learning Center for Visual
Language and Visual Learning (VL2), Gallaudet University,
Washington, DC 20002. Electronic mail may be sent to
corina@ucdavis.edu.
caregivers that may shape developmental trajecto-
ries (Posner & Rothbart, 2007).
Both adult and developmental psychological
research literatures have benefited from under-
standing how early childhood experiences may
alter the typical developmental time course of
sociocognitive functions, as in cases of acquired
brain damage (Adolphs, Tranel, & Damasio, 1998;
Damasio, 1995; Koenigs et al., 2007), developmental
disorders such as autism (Amaral, Schumann, &
Nordahl, 2008; Bachevalier & Loveland, 2006;
Baron-Cohen & Belmonte, 2005; Frith, 2001;
Oberman & Ramachandran, 2007) and Williams
syndrome (Bellugi, Lichtenberger, Jones, Lai, &
St. George, 2000; Karmiloff-Smith, 2007; Meyer-
Lindenberg et al., 2005) or language deprivation
(Curtiss, 1977; Newport, 1990). These accidents of
nature often put into relief ‘‘seams’’ within and
between complex interacting systems, and thus
provide clues to neural differentiation of processing
systems as a function of early experience.
In the present case, we consider aspects of
social cognition within a relatively understudied
domain, childhood deafness. As we hope to show,
the context of deafness presents highly unique
developmental situations that offer great potential
for providing critical insights into the biological,
cultural, and linguistic factors that underlie the
development of neural systems that impact social
 2009, Copyright the Author(s)
Journal Compilation  2009, Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.
All rights reserved. 0009-3920/2009/8004-0003

cognition. While we cannot hope to cover all
issues in an exhaustive fashion, we consider sev-
eral pertinent examples in hopes that our modest
efforts may encourage others to consider this
unique human condition. The present review con-
siders deafness within a broad perspective. We
hope to demonstrate that insights regarding the
development of social cognition may be gleaned
not only from understanding the adaptations of a
cognitive system in the face of sensory depriva-
tion, but also from understanding deafness itself
as a social experience, in which cultural and lin-
guistic traditions are adaptive and provide deaf
children with unique developmental niches that
could perhaps contribute to differentiated process-
ing. We hope to show how multifaceted conditions
of deafness puts into relief differential contribu-
tions of sensory experience, cultural practices, and
linguistic influences that factor into social cognitive
development.
Our review will discuss emerging findings
from cognitive and neural studies that highlight
three main areas of development (visual attention,
high-level visual processing, and language and
communication) that are known to contribute to
social cognitive development (Grossman &
Johnson, 2007). In these areas, deaf individuals
have shown particular behavioral or neural organi-
zational patterns that are distinguishable from their
hearing counterparts. Most research in this area has
focused on how factors of sensory and ⁄ or linguistic
deprivation have contributed to these differences.
In the present review, we further consider
how behavioral and neural changes may also be
shaped by environmental experiences, such as the
cultural and linguistic practices of families and
communities. A review of these data highlights how
dorsal–parietal, frontal-executive, and temporal–
ventral cortical systems may be differentially
sensitive to these factors. We begin with a brief
overview of childhood deafness, American Sign
Language (ASL), and the American Deaf
community.
Deafness, ASL and Deaf Culture
Acquired deafness may result from infection or
drugs administered during pregnancy. Hereditary
deafness is associated with over 350 genetic condi-
tions (Martini, Mazzoli, & Kimberling, 1997), and
about one third of these genetic conditions are asso-
ciated with syndromes (Petit, 1996). The prevalence
of hearing loss (from mild to profound) is approxi-
Insights From Deafness 953
mately 9% of the population (Ries, 1994; this figure
includes those who lose their hearing due to
advancing age). The prevalence of profound con-
genital deafness is in the range of 0.5–1 per 1,000
births and these infants experience reduced or no
access to the spoken language used by their family.
An even smaller percentage of these deaf individu-
als are born to deaf parents and acquire a signed
language, such as ASL, as their native language
(Mitchell & Karchmer, 2004).
By some estimates, 96% (Mitchell & Karchmer,
2004) of deaf children are raised in households
with parents who are hearing. There is continuing
controversy over the best strategies to promote
linguistic competencies in children who are unable
to process spoken language as efficiently as their
normally hearing counterparts. Parents must weigh
a wide range of factors in their decisions in the
face of often conflicting information from medical,
social services, educators, and community advo-
cates. While technological advances in assistive
hearing devices, including digital hearing aids and
cochlear implantations may provide improved
access to auditory information, linguistic develop-
ment in deaf children raised in hearing households
is often compromised. Language deficits are often
present regardless of whether such children are
learning ASL (Schick & Hoffmeister, 2001; Strong &
Prinz, 1997), English-based signing (Geers, Moog, &
Schick, 1984; Schick & Moeller, 1992) or spoken
English (Geers et al., 1984; de Villiers, 2003). In
contrast, deaf children in deaf signing families,
who are exposed to sign language from birth,
acquire sign language just as hearing children
effortlessly acquire spoken languages, along a
similar developmental time course, and influenced
by linguistic complexity and cognitive development
(Lillo-Martin, 1999; Newport & Meier, 1985). As
we will discuss, the linguistic and sociocultural
context of deaf children raised by deaf caregivers
(in comparison to those raised by hearing care-
givers) has important implications for social
cognitive development.
ASL is an indigenous language that evolved
within North America and is used by members
who self-identify with the Deaf community
and who are part of ‘‘Deaf Culture’’ (Ladd, 2003;
Padden & Humphries, 2005). The capitalization
of the word deaf in this context serves to sig-
nify recognition of deaf individuals as a distinct
cultural group, who are considered a minority
community and whose primary language is
signed (for discussions, see Lane, 1984; Padden &
Humphries, 1988).
954 Corina and Singleton
With a structure distinct from English, ASL is a
fully complex, natural human language. Although
ASL is only one of many autonomous sign lan-
guages of the world, it is the one that has been
studied most extensively. Its linguistic history
involves a creolization of Old French Sign Lan-
guage with local signed languages and homesign
forms that existed in the United States in the early
1800s (Woodward, 1976).
In the 1960s, linguists began to document the
distinct grammatical structure of ASL (Stokoe,
1960 ⁄ 2005). Since then, the field of signed language
linguistics has prospered, including studies of other
signed languages of the world. This linguistic
research has demonstrated patterns that are shared
with spoken languages and revealed unique lin-
guistic structures that capitalize on the visual–ges-
tural modality (for recent discussions, see
Emmorey, 2002; Sandler & Lillo-Martin, 2006). With
the emergence of Deaf Studies and the legitimatiza-
tion of ASL as a U.S. minority language in its own
right, with an estimated number of 100,000–300,000
users (Padden & Humphries, 2005), the language
and culture of the Deaf community have thrived
and gained increased attention from multiple
research disciplines (e.g., anthropology, psychol-
ogy, and education).
Visual Attention: Biological and Social
Implications
There is a common assumption that deficits in a
sensory modality provide increased sensitivities in
remaining modalities: in the case of individuals
with early blindness, for example, that their hearing
is superior to that of sighted individuals. Similarly,
in the case of early profound deafness, enhance-
ments in visual processing could be presumed.
However, careful research in this domain has dem-
onstrated that primary sensory abilities such as
auditory detection thresholds, intensity discrimina-
tion (Niemeyer & Starlinger, 1981), and auditory
gap detection (Weaver & Stevens, 2006) in the case
of the blind, and brightness discrimination (Bross,
1979), visual contrast sensitivity (Finney & Dobkins,
2001), temporal discrimination thresholds (Mills,
1985), temporal resolution (Bross & Sauerwein,
1980; Poizner & Tallal, 1987), and discrimination
thresholds for motion direction (Bosworth &
Dobkins, 1999) in the case of the deaf, are not
significantly altered as a result of loss of a
competing modality (see Bavelier & Neville, 2002;
Niemeyer & Starlinger, 1981, for discussion). Yet,
the evidence does indicate that for higher level pro-
cessing tasks, compensatory differences may be
observed in restricted domains.
Research indicates specific enhancements for
processing of the visual periphery and the detection
of movement in peripheral vision in the deaf
(Bavelier et al., 2001; Neville & Lawson, 1987a,
1987b, 1987c; Parasnis & Samar, 1985; Proksch &
Bavelier, 2002). There is growing consensus that the
visual skills for which deaf individuals exhibit
heightened performance (compared with hearing
individuals) appear under specific conditions,
namely, those that engage spatial attention (for
recent views, see Bavelier, Dye, & Hauser, 2006).
Moreover, these studies suggest that it is auditory
deprivation, rather than sign language experience
per se, that brings about these observed attention
differences (Bavelier et al., 2001; Bosworth & Dob-
kins, 2002; Neville & Lawson, 1987a, 1987b, 1987c;
Proksch & Bavelier, 2002). Specifically, several stud-
ies have examined the performance of deaf native
signers to hearing native signers. This latter group
is composed of normally hearing individuals raised
in deaf signing households. The comparison of
these groups provides an opportunity to systemati-
cally examine the contributions of language experi-
ence (shared between these two groups) from
auditory experience (which differs between these
groups). In these studies, it was only deaf subjects
who showed evidence of enhancement, suggesting
that the lack of auditory input may be more impor-
tant than early sign language experience in altering
spatial attention. Neuroimaging and electrophysiol-
ogy data indicate functional changes in dorsal
visual pathways among deaf subjects in response to
visual attention tasks (Armstrong, Neville, Hillyard,
& Mitchell, 2002; Bavelier et al., 2000, 2001; Neville
& Lawson, 1987a, 1987b, 1987c). These data, cou-
pled with animal studies of sensory deprivation,
provide a compelling case for changes to dorsal–
visual processing streams as a function of auditory
deprivation (Bavelier & Neville, 2002; Bavelier
et al., 2006; Neville & Bavelier, 2002).
Differences in visual attention that develop dur-
ing a deaf person’s childhood may impact aspects
of social interaction. There is a controversial record
of research that has suggested deafness is associ-
ated with social-emotional disturbances. However,
many of these early studies of deaf children’s
behavior were often flawed by a failure to appreci-
ate the heterogeneity within the deaf population
being tested. A common claim is that deaf chil-
dren’s behavioral problems are related to impulsiv-
ity and distractibility. Reivich and Rothrock (1972)

suggested that impulsivity and lack of inhibition
accounted for a significant amount of the problem
behavior in deaf pupils reported by teachers. As
reported in Dye, Hauser, and Bavelier (2008),
mothers rate deaf children as having greater
distractibility-hyperactivity problems than hearing
children (Quittner, Glueckauf, & Jackson, 1990),
while other studies suggest little evidence of
deaf–hearing differences in attention span
(Meadow, 1976). More recently, researchers have
used manipulations of continuous performance
tasks (CPT) with deaf subjects to differentially
assess variables such as impulsivity, persistence,
and distractibility (Mitchell & Quittner, 1996;
Quittner, Smith, Osberger, Mitchell, & Katz, 1994;
Smith, Quittner, Osberger, & Miyamoto, 1998).
According to these studies, deaf children have been
found to exhibit more impulsivity and experience
increased distractibility. In a different CPT study,
Parasnis, Samar, and Berent (2003) reported that
deaf college students with hearing parents had
increased impulsivity when selecting the appropri-
ate response accompanied by decreased perceptual
sensitivity (they found it harder to distinguish
between targets and nontargets) compared with
hearing college students. Some have interpreted
such differences to reflect a deficit in visual
selective attention stemming from poor multimodal
sensory integration as a result of early, profound
hearing loss. Smith et al. (1998), for example,
suggest that sound is an enabling condition for the
development of selective attention. In this deficiency
hypothesis view (Smith et al., 1998), the integration
of information from the different senses is
proposed to be an essential part of the development
of normal attention functioning within each
individual sensory modality. Thus, the lack of
access to sound results in underdeveloped selective
attention capacities in deaf children. Hearing
individuals can attend selectively to a narrow
visual field and still monitor the broader environ-
ment through sounds. This multimodal contact
with the world permits an efficient division of
labor. Deaf individuals, by contrast, must simul-
taneously use vision both to accomplish the specific
tasks and to monitor the broader environment
(Mitchell, 1996; Smith et al., 1998).
An alternative interpretation of the behavior is
offered by Parasnis et al. (2003) who argue that the
apparent impulsivity exhibited by deaf subjects
may be an adaptive strategy. In the absence of
auditory input, deaf individuals must have greater
reliance upon vision for being alerted. The
decreased perceptual sensitivity on the CPT task,
Insights From Deafness 955
they argue, results from redistribution of attention
away from the center and toward peripheral vision.
A similar reallocation view was proposed earlier by
Neville and collaborators (Neville & Lawson,
1987a, 1987b, 1987c; Neville, Schmidt, & Kutas,
1983; see Dye et al., 2008, for a more extensive dis-
cussion of these issues).
A different perspective is offered by Hauser,
Lukomski, and Hillman (2008) who consider execu-
tive function (EF) skills rather than selective visual
attention as a central factor in the reports of impul-
sivity and distractibility in the deaf children. They
note that response inhibition is the prerequisite to
self-regulation, which is instrumental for purposive
intentional behavior (Barkley, 2001). Hauser et al.
(2008) note that while several studies (e.g., Gioia,
Isquith, Guy, & Kentworth, 2000; Roth, Isquith, &
Gioia, 2005) have reported deaf and hearing differ-
ences on clinical tests and rating scales of EF such
as the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive
Functions, other studies have failed to find such
differences (Everhart & Marschark, 1997). Studies
comparing the impulsivity rates of deaf children
born to deaf parents versus those born to hearing
parents, found that deaf-of-deaf children have been
rated more positively, indicating lower impulsivity
rates (Harris, 1978; Hauser, Lukomski, & Isquith,
2009; Hauser, Wills, & Isquith, 2006; Oberg, 2007).
Taken together, these studies reveal an intriguing
interplay between brain adaptations resulting from
altered sensory experience and potential behavioral
sequelae that, in particular contexts, maybe consid-
ered maladaptive. Reports of increased impulsivity
and distractibility have been considered in relation
to visual attention and EF. Researchers such as
Smith et al. (1998) view the lack of hearing as a cau-
sal factor in resulting in deficit selective attention
processes, whereas Parasnis et al. (2003) suggest
the behavior is not deficient per se but rather an
adaptive response in the face of increased reliance
on visual information monitoring. In this view,
there is no explicit claim regarding the role of
audition in the development of selective visual
attention. Instead, these researchers attribute the
behavior to adaptations in the distribution of
attention and focus on functional-anatomical
accounts that implicate parietal attention networks
in this population (Dye, Baril, & Bavelier, 2007; Dye
et al., 2008; Parasnis et al., 2003). Alternatively,
Hauser et al. (2008) implicate differences in EF,
which may manifest in terms of differences in
response inhibition. Functional-anatomical models
which implicate the dorsolateral prefrontal area
in EF and working memory and the ventromedial
956 Corina and Singleton
prefrontal areas with emotional and social decision
making (Anderson, 1998; Eslinger & Grattan, 1991;
MacPherson, Phillips, & Della Sela, 2002) factor
significantly in this account.
At this time, it is difficult to adjudicate between
these accounts. One notes, for example, that the
measures that have been used to establish these
effects range widely in methodology and ecological
validity, from well-controlled psychophysical mea-
sures with highly constrained visual stimuli to sub-
jective rating scales of human behaviors. While
researchers are increasingly cognizant of the hetero-
geneity of deafness and the importance of evaluat-
ing these variables in the interpretation of results,
further attention to this issue is greatly needed.
Additional work is needed to explicate the causal
and adaptive factors that may underlie the reported
behavioral differences in impulsivity, distractibility,
and self-regulation of this population. One factor to
be considered is a deaf child’s early socialization
experiences.These practices may build resilience to
the possible effects of sound deprivation.
The development of visual attention and gaze
following is seen as an important milestone for all
children (Brooks & Meltzoff, 2008; Meltzoff &
Brooks, 2009). Brooks and Meltzoff (2002) explain
that ‘‘gaze following is an entrée into the psycholog-
ical world in which things are important not only
because of their physical properties, but because
they are referred to by others’’ (p. 965). In hearing
caregiver–child dyads, the infant follows the gaze of
their caregiver and subsequently engages in joint
visual attention toward an object while their care-
giver simultaneously produces a linguistic label (or
an emotional reaction) that they can hear while
visually exploring the object. Young infants, below
12 months, may use head turning by the caregiver
as the primary directional cue to elicit directional
attention, but by 12–18 months, infants ‘‘grant
special status to human eyes accompanied by head
movement’’ and treat the adults’ gaze as object
directed (Brooks & Meltzoff, 2002, p. 965). ‘‘The
processes that begin with joint visual attention skills
in infancy are thought to be important to the sub-
sequent capacity for social learning throughout the
lifespan’’ (Vaughan van Hecke et al., 2007, p. 54).
If one adopts this standard model for the deve-
lopment of joint visual attention, a deaf child could
be seen as facing a tremendous perceptual and
cognitive challenge. A deaf child needs to look at
their caregiver to get linguistic input, but they also
need to look at objects to learn about the world.
Across a number of studies observing deaf care-
giver–deaf infant dyads (based in several different
countries and using natural signed languages), a
repertoire of ‘‘visually responsive’’ culturally
embedded behaviors has been documented among
caregivers (Erting, Prezioso, & Hynes, 1990; Harris,
2000; Koester, Brooks, & Traci, 2000; Waxman &
Spencer, 1997). To summarize, deaf caregivers: (a)
use visual or tactile signals to elicit their child’s
visual attention (through a hand-wave or physical
touch), (b) displace their signing to be within the
child’s line of sight (as they look at the object),
(c) use longer wait times before producing child-
directed language (i.e., waiting until the child inde-
pendently looks to the caregiver before starting to
sign), and (d) use greater persistence to successfully
gain and redirect the child’s attention (see Loots &
Devise, 2003, for a more detailed summary of deaf
caregiver–infant dyad behaviors).
Deaf caregivers’ intuitive communicative inter-
action strategies appear to socialize deaf infants
and toddlers into coordinated and complex visual
engagement. Indeed, Harris and Mohay (1997) and
Koester (1995) observed that deaf infants of deaf
caregivers consistently look to their caregivers, and
their caregivers intuitively respond with appropri-
ate linguistic and affective input. In contrast, the
deaf infants of hearing caregivers in their studies
demonstrated low rates of spontaneously looking
to their caregivers.
Loots, Devise, and Jacquet (2005) suggest that
‘‘once the attention-switching strategy and sus-
tained looking are developed, the deaf child’s spon-
taneous and active use of visual attention becomes
more important in initiating and continuing
moments of intersubjectivity than the continuous
use of visual–tactile strategies’’ (p. 372). Thus, the
initial visual–tactile scaffolding produced by care-
givers appears to provide the needed supports for
the development of self-regulation of visual atten-
tion (e.g., attention switching, monitoring visual
access, and following caregiver head position and
eyegaze direction). Moreover, observational studies
of native-signing deaf preschoolers engaged in mul-
tiparty discourse within visually complex environ-
ments show that they can smoothly gaze-follow
their teacher and correctly use discourse cues
in ASL to anticipate visual turn taking (Crume &
Singleton, 2008). Yet, in this classroom context, deaf
teachers continued to use explicit visual and tactile
strategies to support the development of visual
attention self-regulation, presumably for deaf pre-
schoolers with hearing parents who would not
have experienced such caregiver strategies at home.
The skills involved in following a caregiver’s
direction of eyegaze and pointing gestures,

and child-initiated coordinated attention such as
pointing to or showing objects to the caregiver, are
argued to involve aspects of the brain’s EF such as
attention regulation, inhibitory control, and
self-monitoring (Carlson & Meltzoff, 2008; Mundy
& Acra, 2006). Thus, in the context of deaf chil-
dren’s family and school settings, we would argue
that deaf caregiver and teachers’ cultural and
linguistic practices that structure visual attention
may even enhance a deaf child’s EF—or at the very
least builds in resilience, or protection from the
possible disadvantages of sound deprivation.
This view of the cultural structuring of devel-
opmental processes is consistent with work con-
ducted in cross-cultural investigations of
caregiver–child interaction. For example, Rogoff
and her colleagues (Chavajay & Rogoff, 1999;
Rogoff, Mistry, Goncu, & Moisier, 1993) discuss
cultural variation in the ways that caregivers
attend to their children and how they encourage
their infants and children to attend to objects
and events. For example, Chavajay and Rogoff
(1999) observed that middle-class European
American children had a tendency to engage in
a kind of ‘‘fixed-capacity’’ focus on single objects
or events, and then alternated their attention to
new objects or events. Their parents expressed
pride when the child could sustain their attention
on a singular point of focus. In contrast, Guate-
malan Mayan toddlers and their caregivers
seemed to have a cultural preference for simulta-
neously attending to multiple sources of focus. In
discussing these cultural differences, Chavajay
and Rogoff noted that the social worlds of the
Mayan children included large families often in
each other’s presence, maintaining proximity
often by sitting in a semicircle, which could
thereby increase the child’s opportunity for expo-
sure to competing attentional events and multi-
party conversations.
An important question to address, then, is
whether particular neural systems (e.g., prefrontal
systems) could be susceptible to modification as a
result of such cultural practices and social interac-
tions. In the simplest sense, these cultural contexts
can be seen as contributing a framework for how
adults structure the everyday experiences of a
child, defining opportunities for a child to engage
in complex, culturally meaningful interactions.
Along similar lines, Zukow-Goldring and Arbib
(2007) discuss how caregivers ‘‘bracket ongoing
actions with gestures that direct the infant’s atten-
tion to perceptual information embodied in action
sequences’’ (p. 2181). Their position is that this kind
Insights From Deafness 957
of caregiver–infant interaction provides the basis
for developing a shared understanding of events.
For example, in their longitudinal study of 11 hear-
ing caregivers (5 English-speaking Euro-American
middle class and 6 Spanish-speaking Latino work-
ing class) and their hearing infants aged 6–
26 months, Zukow-Goldring and Arbib found that
when these caregivers accompanied their participa-
tion or imitation invitations to their infants with
attention-directing gestures, the infants’ ability to
engage or reach new understandings was
increased.
Therefore, given the importance of hearing
infants’ development of eyegaze following for
their cognitive and linguistic development and
the apparent privileged role of caregivers’ atten-
tion-directing gestures in this process, we would
expect that the highly demanding and gesturally
complex context of visual language interaction
(i.e., the experience of deaf children raised by
deaf parents or having daily interaction with
ASL-fluent early childhood teachers) could pro-
mote early and advanced development of eyegaze
following and attention shifting. Future studies
are needed to determine whether this prediction
would be supported. The fact that the develop-
ment of visual attention can be differentially
shaped across cultures suggests the possibility of
an intimate relation between cultural practices
and modifications of the neural systems associ-
ated with social-attention and EF.
Higher Visual Processing: Facial Expressions and
Human Actions
The perception of facial expressions and the dis-
cernments of human actions serve a critical role in
achieving successful social interaction. Research on
these high-level visual processing domains has
begun to shed new light into neural systems that lie
at the interface between visual perception and
social function. Studies of higher level visual pro-
cessing skills have also reported differences
between deaf and hearing individuals. These
include studies of mental rotation, image genera-
tion, memory for spatial location and face process-
ing (Bettger, Emmorey, McCullough, & Bellugi,
1997; Emmorey, Kosslyn, & Bellugi, 1993; McKee,
1987), and action recognition (Corina et al., 2007).
In contrast to the effects of visual attention noted
above, enhancements in these domains are linked
to experience with signing rather than auditory
deprivation per se.
958 Corina and Singleton
Understanding Faces
In the context of social cognition, studies of facial
expression recognition are of particular interest.
The capacity to extract socially relevant information
from faces is fundamental to normal reciprocal
social interactions and interpersonal communica-
tion (Pelphrey, Singerman, Allison, & McCarthy,
2003). For deaf signers, facial expression serves
dual roles; in addition to the universal emblems
of emotionality (Ekman, 1992), a separate class
of facial expressions serves to indicate linguistic
contrasts in signed language, including language-
specific syntactic and morphological distinctions
(Baker-Shenk & Cokely, 1980). Deaf and hearing
people alike use the face to express emotion. How-
ever, ASL signers also use facial expression and
changes in head and body position to convey lin-
guistic contrasts (Liddell, 1980). The production of
linguistic and emotional facial expression differ in
timing and scope. Facial expressions that serve lin-
guistic functions have a clear onset and offset, and
follow the clausal and lexical properties of ASL
grammar. In contrast, emotional expressions are
more variable in execution, may differ in intensity
and scope, and are not tied to the presence of spe-
cific linguistic forms. Researchers have reported
that categorical processing of facial displays can be
demonstrated for sign but may be grounded in uni-
versally perceived distinctions between communi-
cative face actions (Campbell, Woll, Benson, &
Wallace, 1999).
In language acquisition studies, Reilly and her
colleagues (Reilly & Bellugi, 1996; Reilly, McIntire,
& Bellugi, 1990a, 1990b) have shown different tim-
ing between deaf children’s development of facial
expressions for emotion and for linguistic contrasts.
As with hearing children, emotion expressions are
produced by deaf children consistently by 1 year of
age. However, linguistic facial expressions show a
protracted development, appearing only after the
acquisition of manual linguistic signs. A striking
example is the development of headshake as a
negation marker in ASL grammar. The physical
form of this linguistic behavior is identical to the
common headshake that hearing and deaf children
in the United States use to mean ‘‘no’’ (this often
develops before the age of 2 years). In the adult
form of ASL, negative manual signs such as no, not,
or can’t, must be accompanied with the linguistic
negation marker: headshake. Interestingly, Reilly
et al.’s developmental studies report that deaf chil-
dren first begin to produce isolated headshakes in
response to questions or to reject requests. But
when they first acquire the manual signs for nega-
tion, they appear without a headshake (which is
ungrammatical in ASL). The appearance of the cor-
rect accompanying headshake lags behind the
appearance of the manual sign by 1–8 months.
These findings indicate a separation between acqui-
sition of a social-cultural communicative behavior
(headshake) and the acquisition of grammatical
marker (obligatory linguistic headshake) to signal
negation.
In behavioral studies, judgments of linguistic
and emotional facial expressions produced by
fluent adult signers indicate differential right and
left sided expressivity, which has been argued to
reflect underlying neural control (Campbell, 1978;
Corina, Bellugi, & Reilly, 1999). This finding is
also corroborated by neuropsychological studies of
facial expression production by left- and right-
hemisphere-damaged signers. Corina et al. (1999)
reported a double dissociation in which a right-
hemisphere-damaged signer exhibited greatly redu-
ced facial emotionality with well-preserved produc-
tion of linguistic expressions; the second case study,
of the left-hemisphere-damaged signer, showed
the opposite—exuberant affective expressions with
severely limited linguistic facial expression.
Recent data from functional MRI (fMRI) have
provided new evidence of differential speciali-
zation for facial expression recognition in deaf
signers (McCullough, Emmorey, & Sereno, 2005) in
response to static faces. Studies of deaf signers and
hearing nonsigners have reported bilateral superior
temporal sulcus (STS) activation for emotional
facial expression in deaf subjects and right hemi-
sphere dominance for hearing subjects. In addition,
activation in the fusiform face area (FFA) was left
lateralized for deaf signers for both emotional and
linguistic forms of expression, whereas activation
was bilateral for both expression types in the hear-
ing nonsigning subjects. fMRI studies of facial
information processing in nonsigners have sought
to differentiate these functions within the posterior
STS and FFA. Numerous studies report a role of
bilateral STS in detection of eyegaze (Allison, Puce,
& McCarthy, 2000; Puce, Allison, Bentin, Gore, &
McCarthy, 1998). Recent work indicates that STS
activity is modulated by the context within which
eyegaze shifts occur, suggesting that this region
is involved in social perception via its role in
the analysis of the intentions of observed actions
(Materna, Dicke, & Thier, 2008; Mosconi, Mack,
McCarthy, & Pelphrey, 2005). It is interesting to
note that group differences in STS activation
between deaf and hearing subjects in the

McCullough et al. (2005) study emerged only when
the linguistic expressions were presented within
the context of linguistic manual sign. This is con-
sistent with the growing evidence that posterior
STS regions involved in facial processing may
serve interpretative functions. This may be an
indication that this neural region (i.e., STS) in the
deaf subjects is modulated by linguistic communi-
cative intent. In contrast, the activation in the FFA,
though hemispherically distinct from hearing
subjects, was not modulated by the contextual
manual sign cues. This is consistent with reports
that indicate that FFA may serve more founda-
tional roles in structural encoding of face specific
information (Kanwisher, McDermott, & Chun,
1997; Kanwisher & Yovel, 2006; McCarthy, 1999).
McCullough et al. suggest that hemispheric differ-
ences observed in these studies may reflect percep-
tual differences that invoke greater local featural
processing (as opposed to global-configural pro-
cessing) in the deaf subjects.
It is unknown whether there is a relation
between the staggered production of affective and
linguistic facial expressions in deaf signing children
and the appearance of the differential hemispheric
asymmetries for these classes of expression. What
is noteworthy is that in these cases, the demands
of language processing in the visual-gestural
modality may be driving the differential speciali-
zation and reorganization within temporal lobe
regions.
Understanding Human Actions
Since the discovery of ‘‘mirror neurons’’ in Macaque
primates (Gallese, Fadiga, Fogassi, & Rizzolatti,
1996; Rizzolatti, Fadiga, Gallese, & Fogassi, 1996),
there has been renewed interest in the neural
basis of human action understanding. A human
mirror neuron system (hMNS) has been evoked as
a neural basis for a wide range of social behaviors
including imitation, empathy, and language, and
by some accounts even provided a foundation for
human culture (Gallese, 2007). Dysfunction within
a human mirror neuron has been argued to under-
lie developmental deficits such as autism (Iacoboni
& Mazziotta, 2007; Oberman & Ramachandran,
2007; Williams, Whiten, Suddendorf, & Perrett,
2001). Data from functional neuroimaging have
been used as evidence for a human homolog of a
mirror neuron system characterized as a bilateral
fronto-parietal network capable of representations
of action–perception pairings (Miall, 2003). Anato-
Insights From Deafness 959
mical regions that factor prominently in this
network include ventral premotor cortex and
inferior parietal lobule, the STS, and intraparietal
sulcus.
Thus, studies of deaf signers may provide an
important way to help constrain the investigation
of the broad neurofunctional scope of the hMNS.
For example, to the extent that an hMNS underlies
linguistic capacity, we might predict that deaf
signers, whose language is expressed largely by
manual actions would strongly engage the hMNS.
In a recent review of the neuroimaging findings
in signers, Corina and Knapp (2006) evaluated
whether frontal and parietal lobe bilaterally
showed activations during the perception and
production of signing as is predicted by an hMNS
account of language. The findings showed only
partial support for this hypothesis and indicated
that only left hemisphere regions satisfied the
necessary condition of cojoint activation. In addi-
tion, left frontal activations were most commonly
reported in Broca’s area (BA 45) rather than the
frontal-ventral regions (44 ⁄ 6) that are often asso-
ciated with hMNS activations. These data thus
suggest a full hMNS account of language must
acknowledge the left hemisphere specialization for
human languages and the possibility for regional
shifts in anatomical representations.
Studies of nonlinguistic human action processing
provides further evidence that current hMNS
accounts of action understanding are likely too
simplistic. In a recent PET study, Corina et al.
(2007) examined neural activation in response to
the perception of object-oriented human action
(e.g., drinking from a glass) and intransitive actions
(e.g., rubbing your eyes) in deaf and hearing
subjects. While hearing subjects evidenced a
pattern of bilateral inferior-frontal and parietal
activations commonly associated with hMNS, deaf
subjects exhibited qualitatively different patterns
of activation with prominent bilateral ventral-
occipito-temporal activations.
These human action processing data are impor-
tant in the context of social cognition as they sug-
gest that the hMNS may not be an inevitable
processing system for human action understanding.
Indeed, data from language and gesture studies in
the deaf subjects suggest that the hMNS may be
mutable and subject to reorganization. The engage-
ment of the temporal-ventral region may reflect
active monitoring of featural properties of human
actions that are necessary for differentiation of
linguistic and nonlinguistic human action. Thus, as
with facial expression processing (as discussed
960 Corina and Singleton
earlier), there is growing evidence for functional
specialization of temporal-ventral systems that may
underlie the careful analysis of human forms and
actions.
What is striking is that in each of these cases,
face and human action recognition, deaf individu-
als are confronted with a constrained signaling
medium (i.e., visually perceptible human manual
and facial actions) that must take on additional
functionality (to convey not only emotion and
environmental interaction but language as well).
Each of these cases reveals further specialization
within temporal lobe and temporal-ventral
regions, perhaps in response to this added visual
signaling complexity. Hearing children bring both
auditory and visual capacities in assimilating their
environment, which, as previously noted, affords
an efficient division of labor that is not available
to the deaf child. Therefore, a hearing child’s task
does not require resolving competing linguistic
and nonlinguistic input within the visual modality
to the same degree as deaf, sign-exposed children
must do. One might expect that in addition to
developing a temporal-ventral processing system
that might attune the deaf child to differentiate
subtle visual signals, the deaf child must further
develop frontal-executive control mechanisms to
modulate responses to these signals. Taken
together, one may interpret these ‘‘competing’’
modality interactions of language and non-
language input as an example of complex
human–environment interaction that demands a
particular kind of attentional and higher order
processing that supports the unlayering or disen-
tangling of perceptually similar, but functionally
different, input. The result of this specialized
processing may lead to enhanced parietal-
attentional and occipito-temporal functioning.
Whether there are specialized frontal-executive
functionalities that arise in concert with or in
response to these processing demands is not yet
known. A question of interest is whether deaf
caregivers may be using communicative strategies
to uniquely demarcate these complex layers,
which has the effect of supporting the child’s
process of resolving this task.
Whether there are strict timetables or critical
periods for such reorganization is unknown (but
see Newman, Bavelier, Corina, Jezzard, & Neville,
2002); however, a recent developmental study pro-
vides some insights. Krentz and Corina (2008) used
a looking time paradigm to explore nonsigning
hearing infants’ sensitivities for distinguishing sign
language from complex pantomime. The moti-
vation for these studies is derived from longstand-
ing findings that hearing infants show attention
preferences for speech over other forms of complex
acoustic stimuli (Colombo & Bundy, 1981; Glenn,
Cunningham, & Joyce, 1981; Vouloumanos &
Werker, 2004). Previous speech-based studies have
been taken as evidence for an innate bias to human
language. However, it is unclear whether this
looking preference reflects a bias for speech or
human language more generally. In this study,
6-month-old hearing infants looked longer at sign
stimuli compared to complex pantomimes.
Interestingly, the preference for sign language was
not observed in 10-month-old hearing infants; in
fact, there were no differences in looking times for
pantomime or signs at this later age. This change
in looking behavior between 6 and 10 months may
reflect hearing infants’ gradual loss of sensitivity to
linguistic forms that are not encountered in their
home environment. This result mirrors infants’ loss
of detection of linguistic contrasts for spoken
language (Best, McRoberts, & Sithole, 1988; Eimas,
1975; Werker & Tees, 1984). This attunement may
have functional origins that extend beyond
language per se: It is known that infants are close
monitors of psychosocial content available from
the eye, mouth, and head movements of adults
(Meltzoff & Brooks, 2007). Thus, infants’ discrimi-
nation of linguistic from nonlinguistic motion may
be an even more sophisticated instantiation of their
on-line attempts to learn whether the actions of the
viewed adult have emotional-communicative rele-
vance (Knapp, Cho, & Corina, 2008). The specula-
tion is that this timeframe may be a period in
which infants are beginning to show a specializa-
tion for human actions that are linguistic in nature
versus those which are not. Preliminary evidence
suggests that deaf sign-exposed infants maintain
their interest in signs over pantomime during this
time (Klarman, Krentz, Brinkley, Corina, & Kuhl,
2008).
The appreciation of facial expression and inter-
pretation of human actions are of course critical to
all social interactions and there is no evidence to
indicate that deaf individuals possess differences in
responsivity to human emotions or actions. In the
present case, however, acquisition of a visual–
gestural language appears to place requirements
for the development of specialized mechanisms
for processing this information, which often is
highly similar in form to nonlinguistic, but socially
meaningful counterparts. We maintain that the
brain is capable of accommodating these new
functions and does so by engendering increased

bilateral hemispheric participation and specializa-
tion within the inferior temporal lobes.
The Role of Language in Social Cognition: Deaf
Children and Theory of Mind Studies
Theory of mind (ToM) refers to the awareness of
how mental states such as memories, beliefs,
desires, and intentions govern the behaviors of self
and others (Baron-Cohen, 2000). ToM is considered
a cornerstone of social intelligence and satisfying
social interaction and develops rapidly during the
preschool years (Peterson, Wellman, & Liu, 2005).
There is ongoing controversy as to the causal prin-
ciples that underlie belief attribution and ToM (for
a recent review of pertinent issues and evidence,
see Saxe, Carey, & Kanwisher, 2004). The relation
of language to the development of ToM is one of
many prominent issues raised in these debates.
Studies of deaf children have contributed signifi-
cantly to our understanding of the relation between
language and ToM. As noted above, by some esti-
mates, 96% (Mitchell & Karchmer, 2004) of deaf
children are raised in households with parents who
are hearing. For a child with auditory challenges,
this often results in a lack of full access to a consis-
tent adult language model and can lead to delays
in language development at critical periods.
The selective deficits in language ability
observed in some cases of deafness provide an
opportunity to tease apart effects of cognitive matu-
ration and engagement in social interaction at least
to the extent that the latter do not themselves
depend on language acquisition (Schick, de Villiers,
de Villiers, & Hoffmeister, 2007). Studies of deaf
children with hearing parents report significant
delays in the mastery of verbal and nonverbal ToM
tasks (Marschark, 1993; Peterson & Siegal, 1995;
J. de Villiers, 2005; de Villiers & de Villiers, 2000).
The case for linguistic influences as a factor comes
from the comparisons of deaf children of hearing
parents (DoH) with deaf children who are raised
in households with deaf signing parents (DoD).
DoD children acquire sign language naturally as
a primary language and exhibit linguistic com-
petencies on par with hearing children raised in
spoken language environments. The DoD children
do not evidence delays on ToM tasks (Schick et al.,
2007).
Additional studies have compared the perfor-
mance of DoH to autistic children, who are also
known to display deficits on ToM tasks (Peterson
et al., 2005). Deaf children with linguistic deficits
Insights From Deafness 961
nevertheless exhibit social responsiveness in con-
trast to autistic children. Furthermore, while devel-
opment of ToM is developmentally delayed, the
DoH children nevertheless advance through the
eventual progression in their attainment of ToM. In
contrast, autistic children demonstrate a different
sequence of understanding in the later stages of the
progression. Thus, it is argued that individuals
with autism may have a distinctive, autism-specific
difficulty with the sort of mental state understand-
ing that is needed for false-belief tasks above and
beyond other sorts of mental state understanding
(Peterson et al., 2005).
Recent work by Meristo et al. (2007) has
extended earlier investigations of the development
of ToM in deaf children by comparing native sign-
ing children in Italy and Estonia in their respective
signed languages as a function of school environ-
ment. In this study, deaf children’s communicative
experiences in the classroom, native (DoD) signing
deaf children attending bilingual-(sign and spoken
language) based programs outperformed native
signers attending oral programs that emphasized
speech only. This pattern was observed in both the
Italian and Estonian samples. In addition, these
studies replicated the well-known finding of overall
poorer performance of ToM tasks in deaf children
from hearing homes in Italy, Estonia, and Sweden
(Meristo et al., 2007). These findings suggest that
the expression of ToM in native signing deaf chil-
dren may depend not only on early language expe-
rience but also on children’s continuing exposure to
opportunities for monitoring conversational input
about mental states. Opportunities for exposure to
contexts in which discourse of mental causes is
present is known to be correlated with the develop-
ment of false belief (Cutting & Dunn, 1999).
Data from deaf signing children have been used
to argue that specific formal properties of language,
for example, the understanding of syntactic com-
plements (J. de Villiers, 2005; P. de Villiers, 2005),
underlie the appearance of ToM abilities. Yet
whether these specific constructions are causal is a
matter of debate (see Saxe, 2006; Saxe et al., 2004).
Cross-linguistic studies can provide a powerful test
of the generality of such claims. As reported by
Schick et al. (2007), deaf children’s understanding
of syntactic complements in either ASL or English
were shown to be independent predictors of suc-
cess on verbal and low-verbal ToM tasks. The data
from Meristo et al. (2007) reported above are sur-
prising in this regard as they report differences in
ToM for native deaf signing Italian and Estonian
children. Unless we assume that the acquisition of
962 Corina and Singleton
these critical syntactic complement constructions is
gradient in nature, it is difficult to reconcile these
claims.
Conclusion
In this review, we have examined how the human
condition of deafness can provide avenues for
understanding the development of neural systems
that impact social cognitive processing. Our inte-
grated approach echoes Posner and Rothbart (2000)
who emphasize that developmental pathways for
sociocognitive processes are influenced by ‘‘complex
interaction effects of early temperament predisposi-
tions, socialization processes, relationships, and cul-
ture’’ (p. 438). We have reviewed evidence that
auditory deprivation may engender changes within
dorsal-visual pathways that affect spatial-visual
attention in a highly specific fashion. We explored
claims that these attentional differences may impact
aspects of social interaction, especially with respect
to reports of distractibility and impulsivity of deaf
individuals by some clinical and educational litera-
tures. We contrasted functional-anatomical-based
explanations of these data, which emphasized dif-
ferential roles of parietal-attentional and frontal-
executive systems in the manifestation of these
behaviors. We noted how exposure to a visually
based culture and language may provide a deaf
child with certain cognitive affordances that pro-
mote resiliency and optimization in their develop-
ment of visual engagement, other EFs, and
sociocognitive skills such as ToM. These studies
raise important questions concerning the mecha-
nisms by which culture and socialization may
impact social cognitive development and provide
clues to neural systems mediating these changes.
We discussed how deafness and the acquisition
of a visually based language may promote neural
adaptations that permit the more nuanced percep-
tion required for distinguishing classes of social
behaviors (whether linguistic or emotional). These
data can inform debates regarding the role of
hMNSs in the perception of human actions and lan-
guage. These studies can provide insight into how
these specialized adaptations are realized, in the
present case, by engendering differential hemi-
spheric specialization and engagement of STS and
temporal ventral regions.
In this review, while we have often discussed
various factors and domains implicated in the
developmental social cognition of deafness in
isolation, we readily acknowledge the intricate
interdependencies that are present. We hope to
have shown how the study of deafness and the cul-
tural structuring of attention and visual engage-
ment highlight the potential contributions of
biological, environmental, and cultural factors,
especially during childhood. This case reveals
unique cultural, cognitive, and biological affor-
dances that may enable deaf children to develop
resiliency, and protect them from the potential neg-
ative consequences of sensory deprivation.
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