Face-to-face interactions between hearing mothers and their deaf or hearing infants

Abstract

This research was part of a longitudinal study investigating the impact of early deafness on the cognitive, social, and communicative development of deaf infants with normally hearing mothers in the first 18 months of the child's life. The study examines the patterns of face-to-face interaction between deaf and hearing 9-month-old infants and their hearing mothers, to determine which infant behaviors are most affected by lack of access to the auditory channel of communication. On particular interest was the infants' response to an age-appropriate stressor, the “still-face” situation. which was introduced between two interaction episodes. Although mothers of deaf infants appeared to compensate by increasing their reliance on visual interaction strategies, the deaf infants used fewer overt signaling behaviors such as smiling, greeting, or reaching toward the mother and resorted more readily to self-comforting behaviors than did the hearing infants. However, the deaf infants also engaged in higher levels of repetitious motor activity, which could be interpreted by the partner as another form of eliciting behavior, albeit one that is not typically coded as such.