The NSF award, which will be distributed over three years, will support a longitudinal study of 150 deaf children, ages 6 to 13, attending schools for the deaf around the United States. The research team, led by Matthew Dye, assistant professor in NTID’s Department of Liberal Studies, and Peter Hauser, professor and director of NTID’s Deaf Studies Laboratory, hopes to prove that deaf children who learn American Sign Language (ASL) early in life look at the world differently compared to deaf children who receive a cochlear implant and use a spoken language such as English. They also hope to learn whether it is a lack of hearing or the age at which they are exposed to a natural language that most influences how deaf children perceive the world. RIT/NTID Press Release.