“…Potential sources include rehabilitative factors such as the age of the child at diagnosis, amplification, habilitation, CI fitting (Yoshinaga-Itano, 2003;Kirk, Miyamoto, Lento et al, 2002;Nicholas & Geers, 2006a) and whether post-implant educational intervention is speechbased or sign-speech based (Connor, Hieber, Arts & Zwolan, 2000;, and whether the child is in a special education or mainstream classroom (Geers, Nicholas & Sedey, 2003). Another set of factors being examined are medical/audiological in nature, including cause of deafness (Mitchell, Psarros, Pegg, Rennie & Gibson, 2000;Bauer, Geers, Brenner, Moog & Smith, 2003;Nikolopoulos, Archbold, & O'Donoghue, 2006), age at onset of deafness (Geers, 2004a), whether better or poorer hearing ear receives the implant (Friedland, Venick & Niparko, 2003;Francis, Yeagle, Bowditch & Niparko, 2005), whether a contralateral hearing aid is used (Holt, Kirk, Eisenberg, Martinez & Campbell, 2005;Ching, Psarros, Hill, Dillon & Incerti, 2001), the CI technology (Geers, Brenner, & Davidson, 2003) and the degree of preimplant hearing available to the child (Nicholas & Geers, 2006b). The impact of all of these factors must be considered in light of child and family characteristics that may affect language development, including level of nonverbal intelligence , motor skills (Horn, Pisoni & Miyamoto, 2006), memory/processing abilities (Pisoni & Cleary, 2003;Dawson, Busby, McKay & Clark, 2002), and demographic characteristics such as the child's gender, family size and parents' education (Stacey, Fortnum, Barton & Summerfield, 2006;Geers, Nicholas & Sedey, 2003).…”