Sign and Oral Language Development of Preschool Hearing Children of Deaf Parents in Comparison with Their Mothers' Communication System

The sign and oral language development of five 2-year-old hearing children of deaf parents was studied and compared with the sign and oral language of their mothers. Despite the fact that three of the mothers were less than 15% intelligible and had MLUs of less than 2.0, all of the children were using oral language as their primary means of communication. When signs were used, they were usually redundant to the utterances they accompanied. The signs tended to be gestures in common use or iconic and were not used syntactically. A surprising finding was that the mothers, despite their limited oral linguistic competence, communicated predominantly in the oral mode with their children. Some of these mothers were unaware that they were using predominantly oral language with their children. Implications for counseling of deaf parents are discussed.