How does having limited access to the social world affect Deaf or Hard of Hearing (DHH) children’s emotional development? And in turn, how do impairments in emotional functioning affect social development and the development of psychopathology?

Children with hearing loss often fail to pick up on nuances in other people’s emotional responses. As a result, they do not always understand what is going on. Yung-Ting Tsou, a PhD student at Leiden University, found that having more knowledge of emotions and social conventions can help them in their…

Thursday was World Hearing Day. During one of the Leiden2022 activities, visitors to Corpus Museum could learn all about ears and test whether theirs worked properly. How exactly does an ear work? What solutions are there for deaf people and what is a bionic ear?

Development and validation of instruments that can measure different aspects of emotional competence in children with normal and atypical development, and in different cultures

The ‘empathic mind’ in children with Specific Language Impairments (SLI); what can children with SLI understand of other people’s minds and emotions?

We examine the effect of social learning on emotional competence in children and adolescents with a typical or atypical development.

Why do children with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have difficulties with acquiring emotion regulation skills; and how is this related to their social impairments and comorbid psychopathology?

Two Leiden University science communication projects have been awarded a WECOM grant through the Dutch Research Agenda (NWA). One project is a study of the history of the deaf community in the Netherlands and the other is of a condition that causes people to lose their way.

Across cultures, parents help their children master the social and linguistic codes needed in adult life. Recent research on language socialization found important cross-cultural differences, pointing out the need for more diversity for a full understanding of this process. Deaf communities form…

Reading emotions from others’ faces strengthens social relationships. But how is that for children with hearing loss? Can they learn to read faces just as easily as hearing children? The study by Yung-Ting Tsou and colleagues shows that daily

Across cultures, parents help their children master the social and linguistic codes needed in adult life. Recent research on language socialization found important cross-cultural differences, pointing out the need for more diversity for a full understanding of this process.

Leiden University has a leading position in research and education in the linguistics of languages around the globe, including sign languages. In recent years, digital approaches to studying spoken languages and their communities have rapidly expanded. Language technology and digital approaches relating…

At LUCL, researchers have established the Leiden Hands!Lab for Sign Languages and Deaf Studies.

The School for Digital Deaf Studies 2025 is a hybrid school consisting of one week online and a two-week school in person in Ghana aiming for the capacity building needed to expand academic research and education activities in digital Deaf studies, informed by insiders’ perspectives.

In this project, the hypothesis that language contact crucially impacts the development of spatial grammar and phonology is investigated.

In this project, the hypothesis that language contact crucially impacts the development of spatial grammar and phonology is investigated.

The Leiden HANDS!Lab for Sign Languages and Deaf Studies hosts research activities in the area of sign language linguistics and Deaf studies, with a focus on Africa. In addition to various research projects, we have our Deaf studies lecture Series in International Sign and offer various regular and…

Open access, online talks on African Sign Language Studies, in International sign and English

The aim of this thesis was to study the link between hearing loss, language skills, and social functioning in deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children. Sufficient language skills are an essential prerequisite to develop appropriate communication skills, in order to join in conversations with others.…

Developmental psychologist Yung-Ting Tsou's research is part of the Breaking the Cycle project. This project of the Focus on Emotions lab at Leiden University uses sensor technology to capture children’s social networks and dynamics during school breaks. Congratulations, Yung-Ting, with the wonderful…

Electrical inner ear prostheses like Cochlear Implants (CIs) help deaf and severely hearing-impaired persons to regain many of their communication abilities. The performance of CI in social environments is, however, not optimal. The new "Machine learning To Enhance teMPoral cOding foR cochleAr impLants“…

Electrical inner ear prostheses like Cochlear Implants (CIs) help deaf and severely hearing-impaired persons to regain many of their communication abilities. The performance of CI in social environments is, however, not optimal. The new

Professor Johan Frijns treats people with hearing loss, conducts research on hearing implants, and gladly shares his knowledge about electrical stimulation of the nervous system.

Social Information Processing in Children with and without Hearing Loss

Adva Eichengreen starts a fellowship focusing on enhancing social participation of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children. Eichengreen has been offered a postdoc position at Leiden University as part of the Marie-Sklodowska-Curie “LEaDing Fellows” Project within the collaboration of the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus…

This dissertation examines whether a cochlear implant provides congenitally deaf born children with sufficient auditory input to acquire low salient and syntactically and semantically complex functional items such as personal pronouns compared to their hearing peers.

Researchers from the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) and the University of Ghana are organising the first-ever pan-African summer school for deaf academics from the African continent (from 1 – 15 August).

On 18 June 2019, Peter Kempees defended his thesis 'Hard power and the European Convention on Human Rights'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. R.A. Lawson and Prof. H. Duffy.

Free playtime and physical play are of great importance to children's social development. That is the main conclusion of innovative research by developmental psychologists and computer scientists from Leiden University.

A group of postdoc and PhDs at our Focus on Emotions lab organized an escape room for staff and students to increase their awareness of diversity and accessibility matters. It was designed particularly for this year’s EUniWell FestiWell, which ran under the headline “Towards global sustainable well-being”.…

A research project by Developmental Psychology professor Carolien Rieffe and researchers of the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science has been voted Smartest Project of the Netherlands 2016.

Birds around airports are more aggressive and sing as if they have hearing loss. Collaboration between researchers of Manchester Metropolitan University and the Institute of Biology Leiden has led to surprising new findings about the impact of anthropogenic noise on birds around airports. Publication…

Adolescents with autism or hearing loss report fewer feelings of guilt and shame than their peers. However, guilt does still serve a ‘corrective function’ in this group. This is what Evelien Broekhof’s dissertation reveals. PhD defence on 4 June.

Understanding others’ emotional behavior is essential for navigating daily social life. But how is such an understanding achieved? The eye-tracking study by Yung-Ting Tsou and colleagues shows that children with hearing loss adopt a unique visual strategy that makes uses of explicit visual information…

The cultural linguistic minority group of deaf people who communicate using sign language systematically experiences limited access to fundamental rights. Linguist Joni Oyserman identified this problem and has received a Meijers grant to fund her investigation.

Now available on YouTube!

Research into 25 years of lethal violence in the Netherlands and into language socialisation of deaf families in Africa will receive grants from the Leiden University Fund (LUF).

Academic studies or an academic career are a big challenge if you are deaf. Particularly in Africa, where many countries don’t even have secondary schools for the deaf. A team of Leiden academics has organised the first summer school for and by deaf academics on the African continent, in Ghana. We spoke…

The Leiden University psychologist Carolien Rieffe will investigate how to create an social climate at high schools, to make young people with autism feel more comfortable and able to engage with their social surroundings and thus develop essential social and emotional skills. Rieffe and collaborators…

Academic studies or an academic career are a big challenge if you are deaf. Particularly in Africa, where many countries don’t even have secondary schools for the deaf. A team of Leiden academics has organised the first summer school for and by deaf academics on the African continent, in Ghana. We spoke…

This dissertation aims at enhancing our knowledge of whether a CI provides sufficient access to auditory speech input to acquire verbal morphology by comparing outcomes of CI children to those of their normal hearing peers and to those of children with specific language impaired (SLI).

This thesis addresses the problem of designing performance and energy efficient embedded streaming systems, that is, systems which process a stream of input data coming from the environment and generate a stream of output data going into the environment.

Psychologists of Leiden University and Peking University will collaborate to investigate the deficiencies in emotion recognition in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The new collaboration fits very well in the policy of Leiden University in which intensified collaboration with China has…

Boys with autism are more prone to develop physical complaints, depression and aggressive behaviour. Psychologists at Leiden University have discovered that this is mainly related to rumination. Publication in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.