Hearing-impaired children’s listening skills in a referential communication task: an exploratory study

Abstract

Twelve hearing-impaired children with a mean age of 6.79 years and a mean hearing loss of 77 dB were matched with 12 normally hearing control subjects. Both were ‘listeners’ in a referential communication game. They received messages of various degrees of ambiguity through the medium of a glove puppet. The experiment was designed to decide between two hypotheses: the first that hearing-impaired children cope better with ambiguity because they must interpret auditorially degraded messages; and the second that their performance would be inferior because of their lack of verbal skills. Their patterns of correct answers and requests for clarification were analysed and their performance was found to be inferior. This is explained in terms of their relatively poor speech; their understanding of the experimental situation; and the possibility of learned helplessness.