We compared 20 prelingually profoundly deaf adolescents (age: 11-16 years) and 20 matched, hearing adolescents on a picture-sequencing task and on a social judgment test. In addition, we also tested 14 younger deaf children (age: 6-10 years) and compared their data with those from 20 hearing peers as well as those from the older deaf participants on the picture-sequencing task. The results from this study did not provide evidence for the hypothesis that deaf adolescents possess significantly poorer knowledge about social reasoning than age-matched hearing peers, but it did present further additional support for Peterson and Siegal's (1995) conversational hypothesis: a proposal that a deprivation in conversations about mental states leads to an impairment in the development of an awareness of mental states in the younger deaf children.

Popular theory on the tendency to cradle an infant to the left side points to the specialization of the right hemisphere for the perception and expression of emotion. J. S. Sieratzki and B. Woll (1996) recently suggested that more emphasis be placed on the auditory modality, specifically focusing on the role of prosodic information. In this study, the direction of the lateral cradling bias in a group of profoundly deaf children, a group of deaf adults, and a control group of adults with no hearing impairment was investigated. The authors found a strong leftward cradling bias in all groups, a bias that was, if anything, stronger in the deaf participants. Given that people who are profoundly deaf, especially those who have been deaf from birth, have not been exposed to auditory prosody, the data do not support the suggestion that such prosodic information is the basis for the leftward cradling bias.