The Writing Process and the Written Product in Bimodal Bilingual Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children

Moa Gärdenfors

doi:10.3390/languages6020085

Abstract

How does bimodal bilingualism—a signed and a spoken language—influence the writing process or the written product? The writing outcomes of twenty deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children and hearing children of deaf adults (CODA) (mean 11.6 years) with similar bimodal bilingual backgrounds were analyzed. During the writing of a narrative text, a keylogging tool was used that generated detailed information about the participants’ writing process and written product. Unlike earlier studies that have repeatedly shown that monolingual hearing children outperform their DHH peers in writing, there were few differences between the groups that likely were caused by their various hearing backgrounds, such as in their lexical density. Signing knowledge was negatively correlated with writing flow and pauses before words, and positively correlated with deleted characters, but these did not affect the written product negatively. Instead, they used different processes to reach similar texts. This study emphasizes the importance of including and comparing participants with similar language experience backgrounds. It may be deceptive to compare bilingual DHH children with hearing children with other language backgrounds, risking showing language differences. This should always be controlled for through including true control groups with similar language experience as the examined groups.

Highlights

As the bimodal bilingual deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) and children of deaf adults (CODA) groups of this study demonstrated few differences, in aligned with the previously presented studies (Davidson et al 2014; Goodwin et al 2017; and Gärdenfors et al 2019), this shows the rationale of Hall and Dills’ (2020)
Before concluding with the study’s most important findings, I want to highlight that this group of participants is small, it is important to emphasize they come from a small population, and that the study consist of very many participants when considering the proportion of balanced bimodal bilingual DHH children in Sweden
The other similar but important American studies (Davidson et al 2014; Goodwin et al 2017) included between three and five bimodal bilingual DHH children, and the DHH population in the US is more than a hundred times as great as that in Sweden (Mitchell 2006)

Summary

Introduction

Bimodal bilingualism, being bilingual in two different modalities, is characteristic of those who use a spoken language and a sign language. Hearing children of deaf adults ( CODA) typically belong to this group because their deaf parents use sign language, while there is only a minority of deaf and hard of hearing children DHH children) who speak and comprehend both a spoken and a signed language. The majority of the DHH children are born into hearing families who have never been in contact with sign language before, with the result that many of these children do not learn any sign language (Humphries et al 2012; Mauldin 2012). The motivation of the study is to explore the influence of the knowledge of both spoken Swedish and Swedish Sign Language on the written product and process of DHH and hearing bimodal bilingual children

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Conclusion