In the United States, one in a thousand children is born profoundly deaf. Despite their inability to hear at birth, communication and language acquisition are fundamental to their general cognitive development and their engagement with their surroundings. While most deaf children in the developed world receive hearing aids and/or cochlear implants, and use spoken language as their primary mode of communication, there are Deaf communities around the world that use signed languages. In 1957, Noam Chomsky, the pioneer of the nativist theory of language acquisition, claimed that all humans are born with an innate capacity for language, in other words, a language acquisition device.
Video Language acquisition by deaf children
Role of the environment
Deaf children born to deaf parents
About three percent of deaf children are born to two deaf parents, with one percent born to one hearing and one deaf parent.
Deaf children born to hearing parents
About 96% of deaf children are born to hearing parents. The majority of these children receive hearing aids and/or cochlear implants, and are taught to listen and to use spoken language using these devices.
Maps Language acquisition by deaf children
Methods
Pedagogy
Language acquisition strategies for signing deaf children are different than those appropriate for hearing children. For parents with deaf children who do not use amplification (hearing aids or cochlear implants), joint attention (an important component to language development) can be problematic. Hearing children can watch their environment and listen to an adult comment on it. However, children who do not hear have to switch their visual attention back and forth between stimuli. Since observation and language occur sequentially rather than simultaneously for deaf children, the association is less obvious, and the necessary cognitive processing to make these connections are more difficult. To lessen these demands, a parent can use certain strategies to make language more accessible to their deaf children. Strategies for nonverbal communication include using facial expressions and body language to show emotion and reinforce the child's attention to their caregiver. To attract and direct a deaf child's attention, caregivers can break his line of gaze using hand and body movements, touch, and pointing to allow language input. In order to make language salient, parents should use short, simple sentences so that the child's attention doesn't have to be divided for too long. Finally, to reduce the need for divided attention, a caregiver can position themselves and objects within the child's visual field so that language and the object can be seen at the same time.
Speech and oral methods
For deaf children who use listening and spoken language as their primary mode of communication, their families will often participate in Auditory-verbal therapy, a means of enhancing the innate language and listening skills of deaf children. Most children who receive cochlear implants before the age of 18 months follow language-learning trajectories of their peers who have typical hearing.
Signing and manual methods
ASL (American sign language)
ASL is a human language with equal linguistic complexity and expressiveness than that of any other spoken language. It employs signs made by moving one's hands along with one's facial expressions and body language. Most medical professionals emphasize that deaf children only have two options: the oral route (access to spoken language only) and the manual route (sign language). They ignore that there is yet another way to communicate, that is, using sign language while simultaneously promoting English development (in various modalities depending on the child's age and ability: reading/written, spoken/listening), at separate times during the day, also known as the bilingual approach. Some studies indicate that if a deaf child learns sign language, he or she will be less likely to learn spoken languages because they will lose motivation. However, Humphries insists that there is no evidence for this. Learning ASL prevents linguistic deprivation along with the social ramifications such as feelings of exclusion from the hearing community. Learning ASL at an early stage of development significantly improves a deaf child's communication skills.
Manually Coded English
Manually coded English is any one of a number of different representations of the English language that uses manual signs to encode English words visually. Although MCE uses signs, it is not a language like ASL; it is an encoding of English that uses hand gestures to make English visible in a visual mode. Most types of MCE use signs borrowed or adapted from American Sign Language, but use English sentence order and grammatical construction.
Numerous systems of manually encoded English have been proposed and used with greater or lesser success. Other methods like Signed English, Signing Exact English, Linguistics of Visual English, and other methods use signs borrowed from ASL along with various grammatical marker signs, to indicate whole words, or meaning-bearing morphemes like -ed or -ing.
Because MCE systems are encodings of English which follow English word order and sentence structure, it's possible to sign MCE and speak English at the same time. This is a technique that is used in order to teach deaf children the structure of the English language not only through the sound and lip-reading patterns of spoken English, but also through manual patterns of signed English. Because of the close connection between the two, it is easier for hearing people to learn MCE than ASL.
Cued speech
Cued Speech is a hybrid, oral/manual system of communication used among some deaf or hard-of-hearing people. It is a specialized techniques that uses handshapes near the mouth ("cues") in order to represent sounds that are hard for deaf people to distinguish from one another through speechreading ("lipreading") alone, in order for them to be able to observe and fully understand speakers of English (or other spoken languages) using the system of cued speech.
Cued speech is not a signed language, and it does not have any signs in common with ASL. It is a kind of augmented speechreading, making speechreading much more accurate and accessible to deaf people. The signs by themselves have no meaning; they only have meaning as a cue in combination with a mouth shape, so that the mouth shape 'two lips together' plus one handshape might mean an 'M' sound, the same shape with a different cue might represent a 'B' sound, and with a third cue might represent a 'P' sound.
Some research shows a link between lack of phonological awareness and reading disorders, and indicate that teaching cued speech may be an aid to phonological awareness and literacy.
Fingerspelling
Another manual encoding system used by the deaf and which has been around for over two centuries is fingerspelling. However fingerspelling is a system that encodes letters and not words or morphemes, so is not a manual encoding of English, but rather an encoding of the alphabet. As such, it is a method of spelling out words one letter at a time using 26 different handshapes. In the United States and many other countries, the letters are indicated on one hand and go back to the deaf school of the Abbe de l'Epee in Paris. Since it's connected to the alphabet and not to entire words, it can be used to spell out words in any language that uses the same alphabet; so it is not tied to English, and to that extent, it is analogous to other letter-encodings, such as Morse code, or Semaphore. The Rochester Method relies heavily on fingerspelling, but it is slow and has mostly fallen out of favor.
Hybrid methods
Hybrid methods use a mixture of aural/oral methods as well as some visible indicators such as hand shapes in order to communicate in the standard spoken language by making parts of it visible to those with hearing loss.
Total communication
Literacy
Reading
According to Goldin-Meadow, reading requires two essential abilities: familiarity with a language and understanding the mapping between that language and the written word. At birth, deaf children are deficient in both. However, reading is possible if deaf children learn ASL, a linguistic code that although, not based on sounds, is still nonetheless a language.
Once they have acquired ASL, deaf children learn how to map between sign language and print so that they can learn English. Several techniques are used to help bridge the gap between ASL and spoken language or the "translation process" such as sandwiching and chaining.
Sandwiching consists of alternating between saying the word and signing it. Chaining consists of finger spelling a word, pointing to the spoken language version of the word and using pictorial support. Although chaining is not widely used, it creates an understanding between the visual spelling of a word and the sign language spelling of the word. This helps the child become bilingual in both ASL and spoken language.
More importantly, the deaf child's social context is crucial for nurturing his or her capacity to read. Research shows that deaf children born to deaf parents are usually better readers than deaf children born to hearing parents. This is due to the fact that deaf parents provide a strong social and emotional network and may immediately have access to the necessary resources for their child. Deaf parents already anticipate the needs of their child, having been through the same experience, as opposed to a hearing parent.
Although MCE is helpful, ASL is the key component for deaf children's reading. Deaf children who made progress in ASL and MCE also made progress in reading English, but children who only made some progress in MCE didn't make progress in reading English. More evidence for the necessity of acquiring ASL is reflected in studies comparing reading scores and ratings of sign language performance. According to Meadow, there is a positive relationship between speech reading scores and ratings for speech, expressive finger spelling and sign usage. Contrary to popular belief, this strongly suggests that deaf children with ASL in fact do acquire strong reading skills. However, children who do not have language such as ASL to map the printed code can never read. Hence, in order for a deaf child to learn to read, he or she must know ASL beforehand. The sooner the child learns ASL the better he or she will be at developing effective communicative skills.
Writing
Mastery of written language is especially important today as we are moving into the Information Age. In order to succeed, one must possess strong reading and writing skills.
Cochlear implants
A cochlear implant is placed surgically inside the cochlea, which is the part of the inner ear that converts sound to neural signals. The implant receives signals from an external device worn behind the ear and stimulates electrodes in the cochlea. These electrodes stimulate the auditory nerve directly, circumventing the hair cells that are involved in the beginning stages of auditory neural processing. Although some researchers claim that cochlear implants only helps hearing for adults or children who become deaf after having acquired language, and not as much children born deaf, recent research has shown that cochlear implants can actually promote the development of speech perception and production in prelingually deaf children. Children born deaf who received cochlear implants showed increased gains in expressive language and speech perception (determined by a variety of phoneme recognition tests) than deaf children who had not received the implant. Strong evidence indicates that the earlier the cochlear implantation is done, the less delays there are in language development for pre-linguistically deaf children. If implanted early enough deaf children can attain clear, normal spoken language.
There is much debate regarding the linguistic conditions under which Deaf children acquire spoken language via cochlear implantation. Some studies have concluded that that long-term use of sign language impedes the development of spoken language ability in Deaf and Hard of Hearing children as well as reading comprehension, and that using sign language is not at all advantageous Contrasting this, other studies have found that sign language exposure does in fact facilitate the development of spoken language Deaf children of Deaf parents who had exposure to sign language from birth outperformed their Deaf peers who were born to hearing parents in measures of speech intelligibility following cochlear implantation. It does not have to be one or the other, cochlear implantation or sign language, as native exposure sign language facilitates overall language acquisition for Deaf children, including the acquisition of spoken language.
Ethics and language acquisition
Cochlear implants have been the subject of a heated debate between those that believe deaf children should receive the implants and those that do not. Members of the Deaf Community believe this is an important ethical problem. They strongly advocate that sign language is their first or native language just as any other spoken language is for a hearing person. They do not see deafness as a deficiency in any way, but rather a normal human trait amongst a variety of different ones. Members are particularly concerned with giving deaf children the ability to hear and acquire language; they are worried that it will lead to the genocide of Deaf culture. One issue on the ethical perspective of implantation is the numerous possible side effects that may present themselves after surgery. There are various severe side effects that may result from the surgery, (the body may physically reject the implant; for some reason, there may not be any benefit, or very little gained; the internal component may need to be replaced causing the need for another surgery), even in some cases lessening listening capabilities, losing residual hearing or hearing sounds differently. While the surgery presents one positive solution, these side effects are not often taken into account but are significant and need to be afforded more attention.
See also
- American Sign Language
- Bilingual education
- Classifiers in American Sign Language
- Deaf Education
- Language Deprivation in Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children
- Pointing
References
Source of article : Wikipedia
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