Oral language acquisition by deaf pupils in primary education: impact of musical education

Abstract

When a child has some hearing loss, a great number of interdependent factors of human development, and more particularly linguistic development that come into play, is apparent. From a school perspective, some requirements can be met in order to make school the best place to enhance this linguistic development, while at the same time the deaf child is educated in a normalized environment. The aim of this paper is to carry out a longitudinal follow‐up of a group of five deaf pupils educated in mainstream schools, considered as optimal for school integration, and to analyse their linguistic development considering both the excellence of the school and the use of a programme of musical education with deaf pupils throughout the period of study. These data are compared with those obtained from another sample of deaf pupils, educated in similar settings, who did not follow the aforementioned hearing training programme. The main results show that musical education has some positive effects on supra‐segmental aspects of language, on voice quality and on the structuring of simple sentences.