Deaf Children's Referential Messages to Mother

Abstract

Deaf children 6-10 years of age, from oral or bimodal educational programs, were tested in 2 tasks. In the first, they were required to describe a designated picture from a set of 4 pictures so that their mother could identify the intended referent from the 4 alternatives. In the second, they studied a single picture and were subsequently required to identify it from a set of 4 related pictures. Despite greater hearing loss, bimodally educated children provided more differentiated messages than did orally educated children. Bimodally educated children also provided better reformulations of messages that were initially inadequate. Although mothers of orally educated children received inferior messages, they were as successful at selecting the correct referent as were mothers of bimodally educated children. Both groups of deaf children performed at near perfect levels on the picture recognition task, suggesting that performance differences were attributable to differential message formulation skill as opposed to differential visual processing of the referential array.