Ability of Deaf Children to Use Different Word Classes

1964 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter H. MacGinitie

A completion test based on 90 sentences sampled from second-grade readers was devised. One word was omitted from each sentence, the omitted word being chosen so that four lexical classes and six function word groups were each sampled nine times. Restorations of these omissions by 30 deaf children and 30 hearing children with similar reading ability were compared. Although the hearing children were generally more successful in restoring the omitted words, the patterns of difficulty of the different form classes were remarkably similar for the two groups.

Author(s):  
Nina Jakhelln Laugen

In some respects, hard-of-hearing children experience the same difficulties as deaf children, whereas other challenges might be easier or more difficult to handle for the hard-of-hearing child than it would be for the deaf child. Research has revealed great variability in the language, academic, and psychosocial outcomes of hard-of-hearing children. Universal newborn hearing screening enables early identification and intervention for this group, which traditionally has been diagnosed rather late; however, best practices regarding the scope and content of early intervention have not yet been sufficiently described for hard-of-hearing children. This chapter summarizes the current knowledge concerning psychosocial development in hard-of-hearing children. Risk and protective factors, and their implications for early intervention, are discussed with a special emphasis on preschoolers.


2002 ◽  
Vol 111 (5_suppl) ◽  
pp. 113-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miranda Cleary ◽  
David B. Pisoni

Forty-four school-age children who had used a multichannel cochlear implant (CI) for at least 4 years were tested to assess their ability to discriminate differences between recorded pairs of female voices uttering sentences. Children were asked to respond “same voice” or “different voice” on each trial. Two conditions were examined. In one condition, the linguistic content of the sentence was always held constant and only the talker's voice varied from trial to trial. In another condition, the linguistic content of the utterance also varied so that to correctly respond “same voice,” the child needed to recognize that Two different sentences were spoken by the same talker. Data from normal-hearing children were used to establish that these tasks were well within the capabilities of children without hearing impairment. For the children with CIs, in the “fixed sentence condition” the mean proportion correct was 68%, which, although significantly different from the 50% score expected by chance, suggests that the children with CIs found this discrimination task rather difficult. In the “varied sentence condition,” however, the mean proportion correct was only 57%, indicating that the children were essentially unable to recognize an unfamiliar talker's voice when the linguistic content of the paired sentences differed. Correlations with other speech and language outcome measures are also reported.


2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (12) ◽  
pp. 2977-2995 ◽  
Author(s):  
Molly K. Duncan ◽  
Amy R. Lederberg

PurposeThe aim of this study was to examine relations between teachers' conversational techniques and language gains made by their deaf and hard-of-hearing students. Specifically, we considered teachers' reformulations of child utterances, language elicitations, explicit vocabulary and syntax instruction, and wait time.MethodThis was an observational, longitudinal study that examined the characteristics of teacher talk in 25 kindergarten through second-grade classrooms of 68 deaf and hard-of-hearing children who used spoken English. Standardized assessments provided measures of child vocabulary and morphosyntax in the fall and spring of a school year. Characteristics of teacher talk were coded from classroom video recordings during the winter of that year.ResultsHierarchical linear modeling indicated that reformulating child statements and explicitly teaching vocabulary were significant predictors of child vocabulary gains across a school year. Explicitly teaching vocabulary also significantly predicted gains in morphosyntax abilities. There were wide individual differences in the teachers' use of these conversational techniques.ConclusionReformulation and explicit vocabulary instruction may be areas where training can help teachers improve, and improvements in the teachers' talk may benefit their students.


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Schroeder

In this paper I look at the much-discussed case of disabled parents seeking to conceive (or “selecting for”) disabled children.  I argue that the permissibility of selecting for disability does not depend on the precise impact the disability will have on the child’s wellbeing.  I then turn to an alternative analysis, which argues that the permissibility of selecting for disability depends on the impact that disability will have on the child’s future opportunities.  Nearly all bioethicists who have approached the issue in this way have argued that disabilities like deafness unacceptably constrain a child’s opportunities.  I argue, however, that this conclusion is premature for several reasons.  Most importantly, we don’t have a good way of comparing opportunity sets.  Thus, we can’t conclude that deaf children will grow up to have a constrained set of opportunities relative to hearing children.  I conclude by suggesting that bioethicists and philosophers of disability need to spend more time thinking carefully about the relationship between disability and opportunity.  


1981 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesus Alegria

The paper examines the development of communicative competence in deaf children and its interactions with the use of gestures and/or words to comunicate. Deaf children, in addition to the cognitive problem involved in communication, must also choose a particular channel to produce the verbal and/or gestural message. In the first experiment the experimenter designated one out of four drawings to the "transmitter", who had to produce a message for the "receiver" to enable him to identify the drawing. The data show that (1) the use of gestures to communicate increases with age while the speech used remains constant, and (2) the amount of gestures used is correlated with communicative accuracy. A possible explanation of these data is that the increased use of gestures has a cognitive base: i.e., that it comes from a better understanding of the communication situation. Experiment 2 is aimed to test this hypothesis. The main results show that individual differences in communicative competence are correlated with the use of gestures but not with the use of speech, and that children increased the number of gestures, but not the number of words, when communication difficulty increased.


2013 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 416-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona E. Kyle ◽  
Ruth Campbell ◽  
Tara Mohammed ◽  
Mike Coleman ◽  
Mairéad MacSweeney

Purpose In this article, the authors describe the development of a new instrument, the Test of Child Speechreading (ToCS), which was specifically designed for use with deaf and hearing children. Speechreading is a skill that is required for deaf children to access the language of the hearing community. ToCS is a deaf-friendly, computer-based test that measures child speechreading (silent lipreading) at 3 psycholinguistic levels: (a) Words, (b) Sentences, and (c) Short Stories. The aims of the study were to standardize the ToCS with deaf and hearing children and to investigate the effects of hearing status, age, and linguistic complexity on speechreading ability. Method Eighty-six severely and profoundly deaf children and 91 hearing children participated. All children were between the ages of 5 and 14 years. The deaf children were from a range of language and communication backgrounds, and their preferred mode of communication varied. Results Speechreading skills significantly improved with age for both groups of children. There was no effect of hearing status on speechreading ability, and children from both groups showed similar performance across all subtests of the ToCS. Conclusion The ToCS is a valid and reliable assessment of speechreading ability in school-age children that can be used to measure individual differences in performance in speechreading ability.


1971 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 195-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evans Mandes ◽  
Patricia Randle Allen ◽  
Charles W. Swisher

An experiment was conducted to compare deaf children and normally hearing children on a visual perception task. The visual stimuli were 32 cards, each with a binary pattern of eight circles arranged horizontally or vertically. One circle on the right or top and one circle on the left or bottom of each card were blackened to form the binary patterns, one on each side of fixation. The stimuli were presented tachistoscopically at 1/10 sec. and 1/25 sec. S responded by pointing to the positions he saw blackened on a response card to depict 8 blank circles. It was found that deaf children did as well as normally hearing children and that both groups made fewer errors on the left and top positions of the stimulus dimensions. The data are interpreted as supporting a mediational approach in perceptual development among deaf children.


1968 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
John B. Brannon

The spoken language of three groups of subjects—normal, hard-of-hearing, and deaf—was analyzed by means of a new classification system devised by Jones, Goodman, and Wepman. Each spoken word was sorted into one of 14 word classes. Group means for each word class were compared. It was concluded that a significant hearing impairment reduces productivity of both tokens and types of words. A moderate impairment lowers the use of adverbs, pronouns, and auxiliaries; a profound impairment reduces nearly all classes. In proportion to total word output the deaf overused nouns and articles, underused prepositions, quantifiers, and indefinites.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document