The Development of Communication Skills in Deaf and Hearing Children

Author: Harry W. Hoemann
Source: Child Development, September 1972, Vol. 43, No. 3, pp. 990-1003
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the Society for Research in Child Development
DOI/Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1127649
Summary: The study explores the quality and accuracy of communication among deaf and hearing children, focusing on children's use of language, whether spoken or signed.

Objective: Compare communication performance between 8- and 11-year-old deaf children using manual communication methods and hearing children using spoken English.

Description Task: Participants describe a variety of pictured referents.
Perspective Task: Participants describe referents from the receiver's perspective.
Game-Rules Task: Participants explain the rules of a game.

Deaf children's performances were significantly poorer, attributed to an experiential deficit affecting language acquisition and communication skill development.
Deaf children can't spontaneously acquire competent language skills in their mother tongue due to their inability to hear, affecting both speech and written language.
Only those deaf children with deaf parents are usually exposed to American Sign Language (ASL).

Competence: Profoundly deaf children lack any linguistic competence upon entering school. They don't hear speech sounds or learn intelligibly.
Exposure: Many begin school without knowledge of either English or ASL.
Language Instruction: There is significant investment in teaching English to deaf children, but studies reveal that many remain limited in their reading abilities even after years of instruction.
- Average reading level of deaf adolescents remains around a fourth-grade level.

Deaf children utilize natural gestures and develop home signs to communicate with family.
Pantomime is also utilized as an essential adjunct to manual communication among deaf people.
In residential schools, deaf children adopt ASL from peers and adults, while outside these environments, they develop personalized gestures.

Debate: Investigators have debated if gesture and pantomime form a true language. Some claim visual communication systems, like ASL, are inferior to auditory languages.
Linguistic Analysis: Key studies have validated ASL's status as a language—morphological and grammatical analyses support its complexity comparable to spoken languages.
- Examples include Stokoe’s morphological analysis, development studies by Bellugi, etc.
Unique Features: ASL acquisitions display unique syntax and developmental trajectories similar to spoken language but tailored to visual modality.

Population: 80 children (40 deaf from a public residential school, 40 hearing from a suburban parochial school).
Age Groups: 8 years (mean age 8.4 for deaf, 8.0 for hearing) and 11 years (mean age 11.4 for deaf, 11.5 for hearing).
Hearing Status: Deaf students had pure-tone audiometric tests showing at least a 90 dB hearing loss.
Intelligence Measurement: WISC scores used to ensure a normal range of intelligence; IQ ranges were noted.

Description Task: Participants described various images—complexity and codability were varied.
Perspective Task: Assessed the participants' ability to describe scenes from different visual perspectives.
Game-Rules Task: Participants explained game rules—initial understanding and subsequent explanation attempts were assessed.

Sending and Receiving Scores: Ratings on communication quality and accuracy based on descriptions given.
Communication Accuracy Scores: Evaluated the percentage of successful interpretations by receivers.
Variability in scores indicated differences influenced by age, hearing status, and task complexity.

Results: Sending and receiving scores corroborated main hypotheses, with higher scores seen in older and hearing participants.
- Average sending and receiving percentage scores varied significantly between 8D, 8H, 11D, and 11H.
Data highlighted a consistent 3-year lag in the development of communication skills in deaf children compared to hearing children.

Findings: Prior to demonstrations, many deaf children showed poor performance in taking the receiver's perspective, while hearing counterparts improved significantly after demonstrations.

Performance Ratings: Initial and final explanations by participants measured for adequacy; significant improvements noted especially in older hearing children.

Conclusion: Deaf children's communication skills have observable deficits, leading to substantial lag compared to hearing peers. Despite some progress, the overarching trends reveal systemic barriers to achieving competent communication abilities.
Channel Properties: Considerations about the challenges present in gesture-based communication still pertain to the structural orientation required to convey accurate meanings effectively.
Experiential Deficit Framework: The implications of language exposure and the systematic impact on communication capabilities highlight the importance of early language experiences in both deaf and hearing populations.

Bellugi, U. (1971). The language of signs and the signs of language.
Blanton, R. L. (1968). Language learning and performance in the deaf.
Flavell, J. (1968). The development of role-taking and communication skills in children.
Furth, H. G. (1966). Thinking without language: psychological implications of deafness.
Glucksberg, S., Krauss, R., & Weisberg, R. (1966). Referential communication in nursery school children.
Lewis, M. M. (1968). The education of deaf children: the possible place of finger spelling and signing.
Mehrabian, A., & Reed, H. (1968). Some determinants of communication accuracy.
Stokoe, W. C. Jr. (1960). Sign language structure.
Tervoort, B. (1967). Analysis of communicative structure patterns in deaf children.

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