Sign Language, Speech, and Communication Repair Abilities by Children with Congenital Deafblindness

Abstract

Paul W. Cascella, Susan M. Bruce, and Ellen Trief Children with congenital deafblindness face serious challenges as they develop early com­ munication skills and the use of symbols (Bruce, 2005). These children have fewer op­ portunities to practice communication and they lack access to naturally occurring social cues, the actions of others, and information about context (Bruce, Godbold, & NaponelliGold, 2004; White, Barrett, Kearns, & GrishamBrown., 2004). These challenges are com­ pounded when children have preintentional, presymbolic, or idiosyncratic behaviors that may not be easily interpreted by their com­ munication partners and thus are not rein­ forced within socially contingent reciprocal activities (Schweigert, 2012). There are many reports that identify the communication of persons with deafblind­ ness. These reports are descriptive in nature, highlighting comprehension, gesture develop­ ment, communication actions (that is, forms) and purposes (that is, functions), and the col­ lection of verbal skills. Although varied in content, two trends emerge. One trend is that the majority of children with deafblindness utilize prelinguistic com­ munication, since they rely on vocalizations, body language, and gestures to convey protest, physical cooperation, calling, and answering (Bruce, 2003; Bruce et al., 2004; Hammeyer, 2014; Vervloed, vanDijk, Knoors, & vanDijk, 2006). Prelinguistic skills were also reported by Murray-Branch, Udavari-Solner, and Bailey (1991), who described a 23-year-old student with skills that were estimated to be at the