Today's general educational system requires children to enter kindergarten with a variety of skills to be successful (Lane, Givner & Pierson, 2004), including language and social skills. However, children with hearing-impairment have consistently presented with language and social skills differences when compared to their hearing peers. Specific demographics need to be defined and explored in order to better understand how they pertain to the language and social skills needs of oral children with hearing-impairment. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to describe the characteristics of language skills and social skills abilities in the student demographic areas of socioeconomic status, age of identification, age of amplification, type of amplification, age of entry into school, gender, use of English as the first language, number of siblings, and birth order of twenty-seven oral preschoolers with hearing-impairment.

Language skills were measured by the Preschool Language Scale - 4^th edition (PLS-4) and social skills were measured by the Social Skills Rating System-For Teachers (SSRS-T). A codebook was created to determine descriptions and groupings for the demographic and test information. The codes for the SSRS-T and PLS-4 were derived from the test authors' definitions of those codes. Demographic descriptions were derived from universal definitions of those codes. These two tests were analyzed with regards to the demographics using a content analysis approach. Descriptive statistics were used to determine means and standard deviations groupings. Effect sizes were calculated for the groups with the highest means. An effect size of .5 was considered clinically significant, effect sizes below .5 were considered to have low significance. The effect sizes were further sub-divided within the findings and discussions sections into notably high significance as indicated by those effect sizes .95 and above. The results determined that the demographics of SES, age of identification, age of amplification, type of amplification and birth order were clinically significant with the language codes of vocabulary, syntax, morphology and integrative language skills and the social skills codes of cooperation and assertion within this sample of oral preschoolers with hearing-impairment.