Counting in sign language

Do the visuomanual modality and the structure of the sequence of numbers in sign language have an impact on the development of counting and its use by deaf children? The sequence of number signs in Belgian French Sign Language follows a base-5 rule while the number sequence in oral French follows a base-10 rule. The accuracy and use of sequence number string were investigated in hearing children varying in age from 3 years 4 months to 5 years 8 months and in deaf children varying in age from 4 years to 6 years 2 months. Three tasks were used: abstract counting, object counting, and creation of sets of a given cardinality. Deaf children exhibited age-related lags in their knowledge of the number sequence; they made different errors from those of hearing children, reflecting the rule-bound nature of sign language. Remarkably, their performance in object counting and creating sets of given cardinality was similar to that of hearing children who had a longer sequence number string, indicating a better use of counting than predicted by their knowledge of the linguistic sequence of numbers.     

Embodied numerosity: Implicit hand-based representations influence symbolic number processing across cultures

In recent years, a strong functional relationship between finger counting and number processing has been suggested. Developmental studies have shown specific effects of the structure of the individual finger counting system on arithmetic abilities. Moreover, the orientation of the mental quantity representation (“number line”) seems to be influenced by finger counting habits. However, it is unclear whether the structure of finger counting systems still influences symbolic number processing in educated adults.In the present transcultural study, we pursued this question by examining finger-based sub-base-five effects in an Arabic number comparison task with three different groups of participants (German deaf signers, German and Chinese hearing adults). We observed sub-base-five effects in all groups, but particularly so for both German groups who use an explicit sub-base-five system in their finger counting habits. It is concluded that bodily experiences – namely finger counting – influence the structure of the abstract mental number representations even in adults. Thus, the present findings support the general idea that even seemingly abstract cognition may at least partially be rooted in our bodily experiences.     

Relations of basic arithmetic and motor skills in deaf elementary school children

3 segregated groups of Arab and Jewish deaf children of CA 10;9 (n = 28) were compared with a group of hearing Arab first graders (CA = 6;10, n = 32) on tests of basic arithmetic, static balance control, and the ability to suppress synkinetic finger movements. The hearing-impaired performed as well on arithmetic tasks and on the tests of synkinetic control as their normal peers who were four years younger, while on static balance they were even inferior to the latter. Significant correlations were found between the basic arithmetic and motor skills, within the hearing as well as within the hearing-impaired groups; these remained significant even within the small subgroups of the latter. As these results cannot be accounted for by low intelligence and neurological disturbances, or by direct or indirect effects of deficient language development, the assumption is supported that some type of neurological immaturity, unrelated to hearing loss, interferes with the acquisition of numerical skills in deaf children.     

Deaf and hearing children: a comparison of peripheral vision development

This study investigated peripheral vision (at least 30° eccentric to fixation) development in profoundly deaf children without cochlear implantation, and compared this to age-matched hearing controls as well as to deaf and hearing adult data. Deaf and hearing children between the ages of 5 and 15 years were assessed using a new, specifically paediatric designed method of static perimetry. The deaf group (N = 25) were 14 females and 11 males, mean age 9.92 years (range 5-15 years). The hearing group (N = 64) were 34 females, 30 males, mean age 9.13 years (range 5-15 years). All participants had good visual acuity in both eyes (< 0.200 LogMAR). Accuracy of detection and reaction time to briefly presented LED stimuli of three light intensities, at eccentricities between 30° and 85° were measured while fixation was maintained to a central target. The study found reduced peripheral vision in deaf children between 5 and 10 years of age. Deaf children (aged 5-10 years) showed slower reaction times to all stimuli and reduced ability to detect and accurately report dim stimuli in the far periphery. Deaf children performed equally to hearing children aged 11-12 years. Deaf adolescents aged 13-15 years demonstrated faster reaction times to all peripheral stimuli in comparison to hearing controls. Adolescent results were consistent with deaf and hearing adult performances wherein deaf adults also showed significantly faster reaction times than hearing controls. Peripheral vision performance on this task was found to reach adult-like levels of maturity in deaf and hearing children, both in reaction time and accuracy of detection at the age of 11-12 years.     

Anger communication in deaf children

In this study, we investigated how deaf children express their anger towards peers and with what intentions. Eleven-year-old deaf children (n=21) and a hearing control group (n=36) were offered four vignettes describing anger-evoking conflict situations with peers. Children were asked how they would respond, how the responsible peer would react, and what would happen to their relationship. Deaf children employed the communicative function of anger expression differently from hearing children. Whereas hearing children used anger expression to reflect on the anguish that another child caused them, deaf children used it rather bluntly and explained less. Moreover, deaf children expected less empathic responses from the peer causing them harm. Both groups did, however, expect equally often that the relationship with the peer would stay intact. These findings are discussed in the light of deaf children's impaired emotion socialization secondary to their limited communication skills.     

Deafness and immediate memory for pictures: dissociations between "inner speech" and the "inner ear"?

Born-deaf, orally trained youngsters were examined on two tasks of immediate memory for pictures of objects. The aim was to investigate the extent of speech coding for pictures in immediate memory in a developmental context. The deaf, unlike young hearing children, did not use picture-name rhyme spontaneously as a cue to recall in a paired association task. Nevertheless, they were just as sensitive as reading age-matched hearing controls to spoken word length in recalling pictures by name. This might mean that the deaf use articulatory rehearsal in some immediate memory tasks, but this leads to a paradoxical conclusion. What could "inner speech" in the deaf be for, if it fails to affect their "inner ear" by inducing rhyme sensitivity in the paired associate task? This paradox is discussed in relation to distinctions between covert and overt use of memory cues in the paired recall task and to possible sources of the word length effect in young hearing (8-9 years old) and deaf subjects.     

Development of sign-based perception by deaf children

In this study the sign-based perceptual abilities of 59 deaf children are investigated. Like many hearing speaking children, deaf signing children appear to perceive isolated lexical items based on the formational parameters of those items. Also, deaf signers show trends similar to those exhibited by hearing speakers for the development of the perceptual ability necessary to distinguish between minimal pairs within their respective language systems.     

Metacognitive development of deaf children: lessons from the appearance-reality and false belief tasks

'Theory of mind' development is now an important research field in deaf studies. Past research with the classic false belief task has consistently reported a delay in theory of mind development in deaf children born of hearing parents, while performance of second-generation deaf children is more problematic with some contradictory results. The present paper is aimed at testing the metacognitive abilities of deaf children on two tasks: the appearance-reality paradigm designed by Flavell, Flavell and Green (1983) and the classic false belief inference task (Wimmer & Perner, 1983; Hogrefe, Wimmer & Perner, 1986). Twenty-eight second-generation deaf children, 60 deaf children of hearing parents and 36 hearing children, aged 5 to 7, were tested and compared on three appearance-reality and three false belief items. Results show that early exposure to language, be it signed or oral, facilitates performance on the two theory of mind tasks. In addition, native signers equal hearing children in the appearance-reality task while surpassing them on the false belief one. The differences of performance patterns in the two tasks are discussed in terms of linguistic and metarepresentational development.     

Deaf and hearing children's plural noun spelling

The present study examines deaf and hearing children's spelling of plural nouns. Severe literacy impairments are well documented in the deaf, which are believed to be a consequence of phonological awareness limitations. Fifty deaf (mean chronological age 13;10 years, mean reading age 7;5 years) and 50 reading-age-matched hearing children produced spellings of regular, semiregular, and irregular plural nouns in Experiment 1 and nonword plurals in Experiment 2. Deaf children performed reading-age appropriately on rule-based (regular and semiregular) plurals but were significantly less accurate at spelling irregular plurals. Spelling of plural nonwords and spelling error analyses revealed clear evidence for use of morphology. Deaf children used morphological generalization to a greater degree than their reading-age-matched hearing counterparts. Also, hearing children combined use of phonology and morphology to guide spelling, whereas deaf children appeared to use morphology without phonological mediation. Therefore, use of morphology in spelling can be independent of phonology and is available to the deaf despite limited experience with spoken language. Indeed, deaf children appear to be learning about morphology from the orthography. Education on more complex morphological generalization and exceptions may be highly beneficial not only for the deaf but also for other populations with phonological awareness limitations.     

Social interaction and cognitive growth: An examination through the role‐taking skills of deaf and hearing children

Recent research using theory‐of‐mind tasks has rekindled interest in the possibility that social interaction makes a significant contribution to cognitive development. It is proposed here that this contribution may be most pronounced with phenomena that, like belief or affective states, are internal and abstract. A more modest contribution is envisaged with phenomena that are overt and perceptible. The proposal is explored via comparison of deaf and hearing children's ability to engage in affective and perceptual role‐taking, since the aspects of social interaction that have been implicated in cognitive development are known to be problematic for deaf children. Therefore, the proposal of more marked consequences for internal and abstract phenomena leads to the hypothesis that deaf children should lag behind hearing children on affective role‐taking, while showing little or no difference on perceptual role‐taking. The hypothesis was tested in two studies, one involving 10 deaf children and 10 hearing children aged 6.94– 8.93 years and the other involving 25 deaf children and 20 hearing children aged 5.08– 11.58 years. In both studies, affective role‐taking was examined using a task developed from Chandler (1973), while perceptual role‐taking was examined via an extension of Hughes and Donaldson's (1979) hiding task. The results provide consistent support for the hypothesis, and patterns of correlation between age, affective performance and perceptual performance give clues to the relevant developmental mechanisms.     

Books Received from August 1, 2009 to July 31, 2010

This study aimed to explore the recognition of emotional and non-emotional biological movements in children with severe and profound deafness. Twenty-four deaf children, together with 24 control children matched on mental age and 24 control children matched on chronological age, were asked to identify a person's actions, subjective states, emotions, and objects conveyed by moving point-light displays. Results showed that when observing point-light displays, deaf children showed impairments across all conditions (emotions, actions, and moving objects) compared with their chronological age-matched controls but showed no differences across subjective states. The results are supportive that deaf children present developmental delays in their biological motion apart from the ones relative to their own mental state, and this may be interpreted in relation to the expertise they have acquired in decoding action toward themselves. The findings are discussed in relation to deaf children viewing motion stimuli very differently to hearing children.     

Frequency and predictability effects in eye fixations for skilled and less-skilled deaf readers

The illiteracy rate in the deaf population has been alarmingly high for several decades, despite the fact that deaf children go through the standard stages of schooling. Much research addressing this issue has focused on word-level processes, but in the recent years, little research has focused on sentence-levels processes. Previous research (Fischler, 1985) investigated word integration within context in college-level deaf and hearing readers in a lexical decision task following incomplete sentences with targets that were congruous or incongruous relative to the preceding context; it was found that deaf readers, as a group, were more dependent on contextual information than their hearing counterparts. The present experiment extended Fischler's results and investigated the relationship between frequency, predictability, and reading skill in skilled hearing, skilled deaf, and less-skilled deaf readers. Results suggest that only less-skilled deaf readers, and not all deaf readers, rely more on contextual cues to boost word processing. Additionally, early effects of frequency and predictability were found for all three groups of readers, without any evidence for an interaction between frequency and predictability.     

THE IMPACT OF AUDITION ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF VISUAL ATTENTION

Interactions between audition and vision were investigated in two experiments In the first experiment, school-age hearing children, deaf children with cochlear implants, and deaf children without implants participated in a task in which they were to respond to some visual signals and not others This task did not involve sound at all Deaf children without implants performed much more poorly than hearing children Deaf children with cochlear implants performed considerably better than deaf children without implants The second experiment employed a longitudinal design and showed that the rate of development in visual selective attention was faster for deaf children with cochlear implants than deaf children without implants Moreover, the gams were rapid–occurring within 2 years post-implant surgery The results suggest that a history of experience with sounds matters in the development of visual attention The results are discussed in terms of multimodal developmental processes     

Cognitive consequences of congenital deafness

Comparing congenitally deaf children with hearing children on a variety of information processing tasks provides a natural test of the developmental consequences accompanying the long term loss of a particular sensory input. In this experiment, two sequential and two spatial tasks were used to evaluate the way deaf and hearing individuals process these different types of information. When deaf students were asked to recall the order of a string of lights, they performed as well as hearing students. Deaf students were at a significant disadvantage, however, when processing sequentially presented digits. Deaf students performed as well as hearing students on two complex, standardized spatial tasks. The loss of a major sensory modality had minimal effect on three of the four tasks investigated in the present study. Explanations for the single task with a performance differential are considered.     

Reading skills of hearing and congenitally deaf children

The present study examined the nature of reading skills in congenitally deaf and hearing children 7–19 years of age. Deaf children were drawn from oralist and total communication programs. A visual detection task was designed to assess the extent of phonological coding and chunking used in reading a story of various degrees of syntactic, semantic, and orthographic complexity. The results provide evidence that (1) like hearing children, deaf children tend to use orthographic regularities in their reading: (2) there is no relation in the deaf child's performance between sensitivity to orthographic regularities and the type of communication method used in training; and (3) hearing and deaf readers use qualitatively similar psycholinguistic strategies in their processing of a story.     

Understanding of friendship and social rules in deaf and hearing adolescents

Children who are profoundly and prelingually deaf and live in residential schools lack ready access to the general language environment and some opportunities of societial interactions. How does this affect their understanding of the social world To probe this question 60 deaf and 60 hearing children, ages 9, 13, and 17, were interviewed regarding friendship and social rules (a game rule, a school rule, driving law). Summary scores for each of the 4 areas yielded age and hearing differences. The major findings were: (1) the developmental pattern of responses was similar for deaf and hearing children; (2) deaf children lagged behind hearing children in their social understanding, most in game rules, least in friendship. The results were related to a constructivist developmental perspective and to previous research on socialization of deaf children.     

“MORE” is “LESS”: Sign language comprehension in deaf and hearing children

Matched groups of deaf children of deaf parents and hearing children of hearing parents were required to indicate which of two glasses contained more or less water. The deaf comprehended the meaning of the highly iconic sign “LESS” across all ages while comprehension of the noniconic sign “MORE” was a function of age. These data, reflecting a “MORE is LESS” effect, were the reverse of the findings for the hearing given speech. When given sign, the performance of the hearing was similar to that of the deaf except for the absence of an age-related increase in “MORE” accuracy. Analyses of response biases revealed differential preferences for the two groups. Results are discussed in terms of the relative iconicity of the two signs and Clark's Semantic Feature Hypotheses.     

Phonological coding in reading of deaf children: Pseudohomophone effects in lexical decision

The purpose of this study was to find new evidence for phonological coding in written word recognition among deaf Dutch children. A lexical decision task was presented to 48 severely and profoundly deaf children aged from 6 years 8 months to 13 years 5 months, and a control group of Grade 1 hearing children matched on written word recognition. Sixteen pseudohomophones were introduced, closely matched on orthographic similarity with 16 control pseudo-words. Both hearing children and deaf children made significantly more mistakes on pseudohomophones than on control pseudo-words. Although pseudohomophony effects were smaller for deaf than for hearing participants, the findings were taken as evidence that deaf children also used phonological coding during written word recognition.     

Children's search for targets located within and beyond the field of view: effects of deafness and age

The localisation time of visual targets within and beyond the field of view and the relative timing of the onsets of eye and head movements were examined in deaf and hearing children of two age groups: 5-7 years and 10-12 years. Compared to their hearing peers, the deaf children showed more often a mode of eye-head coordination in which the head leads the eye. The discrepancy between the onsets of eye and head movements were greater for the younger than for the older groups. Furthermore, the deaf children took more time than the hearing children to localise the targets; especially the young deaf differed from their hearing contemporaries. These findings support the view that during development the differences in visual search between deaf and hearing children decrease. The results are discussed in the context of a distinction between representational and sensorimotor control of eye-head responses.     

Verbal and nonverbal maternal controls in hearing mother-deaf child interaction

Investigators of mother-child relations have concluded that mothers of deaf children are more controlling than mothers of hearing children. Excessive maternal control has been linked to inoptimal developmental outcomes, such as child dependence, social immaturity, and submissiveness. In the present study, the verbal and nonverbal controls employed by mothers of deaf preschoolers (3.00–6.75 years) versus mothers of hearing preschoolers (3.00–6.42 years) were evaluated. Subjects were 14 hearing mother-deaf child dyads and 14 hearing mother-hearing child dyads. Each dyad was observed during a 15-minute free-play period and during a 7-minute teaching period. Dependent measures were submitted to appropriate 2 (hearing status) by 2 (task) analysis of variance for repeated measures, followed by post hoc comparisons. The results indicated that the mothers of deaf children: (a) used higher rates of nonverbal controls than the mothers of hearing children, especially during the free-play period; and (b) employed higher rates of verbal controls than the mothers of hearing children during the free-play period, but not during the teaching period. In addition, the interaction tasks exerted differential effects on the two groups of mother-child dyads.