Communication and Cognition: How the Communication Styles of Hearing Adults May Hinder—Rather Than Help—Deaf Learners

Communication and Cognition How the Communication Styles of Hearing Adults May Hinder—Rather Than Help—Deaf Learners David Wood The study of human cognition, our men tal powers, is academic big business. Computer scientists are working with psychologists, linguists , and logicians to build machines that attempt to mimic areas of human knowledge and expertise—machines that can reason, learn, plan, solve problems, and converse. The field of philosophy of mind seethes with debate. The publication of ambitious texts with titles such as The Language of Thought (Fodor, 1975) signal the revitalized philosophical interest in cognitive concerns. Cognitive psychology continues to generate mountains of empirical data in its attempt to illuminate the corners and corridors of mental life. I have been asked to reflect on such concerns and to consider their implications for the study of deafness and cognition. In 20 minutes. In such a short time, one can only hope to make sense of three or four points. Here, in anticipation, are the ones I have chosen to address. First, I will offer a brief historical sketch of past and present theories about the cognitive abilities of the deaf. Then I will identify what seems to me to be a major puzzle implicit in contemporary thinking on the subject. Third, I will offer some speculations about the Dr. Wood is professor of psychology and director of the Deafness Research Group in the Department of Psychology at the University of Nottingham in England. This article is reprinted with the permission of the editors of the 1990 International Congress on Education of the Deaf Proceedings II: Topical Addresses, Rochester, NY: NTID, where it appeared under the title "Cognition and Learning. " nature of this puzzle and how we might solve it. Finally, and equally briefly, I will consider some of the educational implications of what I have to say. Three "Images" of Deafness and Cognition In a recent overview of research into the cognitive capacities of deaf people, Quigley and Paul (1984), following Moores (1978), identified three main views or perspectives on deafness that mark the history of the field. First came the view that, lacking intelligible language, deaf people possessed intellectual abilities that fell far below those of hearing people. This view, which could hardly claim to have been built upon firm empirical foundations, gave away to the image put forward by Myklebust (1964). He suggested that the cognitive life of deaf and hearing people was different in some important respects. Lacking access to sound, he suggested, deaf children exist in a more isolated world than their hearing peers. The hearing child is constantly exposed to what we might term parallel worlds, which arise from the simultaneous experience of vision and hearing. For example, however much hearing children may concentrate on their own action and its effects on the world, they are always open to intrusion from the sounds of others. Their world is organically separated into events that surround and result from the actions of the self as well as events that result from the parallel activities of other people. Deaf children, excluded from such sounds, inhabit a world necessarily more centered on the self and the effects of their own activities. This line of thinking ledMyklebust to the conclusion that deafness creates an organismicshifi, a biologically inspired change in Vol. 136, No. 3 AAD 247 Communication and Cognition a person's orientation towards the world. While rejecting the view that this leaves the deaf person with no symbolic world, no reasoning or rationality, Myklebust's theory still divided the psychology of hearing from that of deafness and it led him to conclude that the cognitive abilities of deaf people are more concrete and thus less abstract than those of hearing people. Fürth (1966), perhaps the major architect of the third, contemporary phase, rejected this division. Working from Piaget's theory of human development, he argued that the cognitive abilities of hearing and deaf people and the stages of development that deaf and hearing children pass through are essentially the same. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Piaget's theory, let me try to convey some sense of why, on his account, one would not expect deafness to...