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MWB & MM : 201 RECENT RESEARCH TRENDS IN ITALY: COGNITIVE & COMMUNICATIVE DEVELOPMENT OF DEAF CHILDREN Marco W. Battacchi Marta Montanini Manfredi Signs of change. The present report is based on studies conducted in Italy in the last ten years. There are good reasons for focusing on such a restricted research corpus: the majority of the studies meet standards of scientific rigor; the research groups involved have been working cooperatively with each other and international research centers; many of the contributions are in accord with the overall pattern of results accumulating internationally; and the Italian research findings may be of considerable interest to scholars outside Italy. There is one more reason we would emphasize -since 1880 Italy has chosen a strictly oral method of education for deaf children. The consequence of this approach is that only deaf children of deaf parents have any knowledge of sign language. Moreover, as they attend schools using the oral method no institutional support is offered to facilitate their use and continued learning of sign language. As a result deaf adults constitute the only substantial group fluent in sign language. The studies reported here, however, challenge this educational tradition as well as the negative stereotype of the cognitive abilities of the deaf. Several lines of research have been pursued: looking at the research on deaf persons' communication as a particular aspect of the larger problems of linguistic and cognitive development; studying Italian Sign ( 1986 by Linstok Press, Inc. See inside front cover. ISSN 0302-1475 SLS 52 Fall 1986 MWB & MMM : 202 Language (e.g. Volterra 1985); and testing the effects of early exposure to sign language or other forms of gestural communication while the child is learning spoken language (e.g. Massoni 1985). In this way a new educational philosophy based on total communication has been put forward and supported. ("Total communication" is intended here in the broadest sense of multi-channel communication that includes spoken language as well as signed language or other forms of gestural communication such as signed Italian, cued speech, dactylology, and non-verbal signalling in general.) To sum up, this kind of research has scientific as well as political relevance because, as B. Mottez (1977) would say, one of its aims is to see that a sensory deficiency is no longer a social handicap. Four kinds'of hypotheses. The theoretical background of the research summarized here can be traced to four basic assumptions from which some predictions about communicative and cognitive development of deaf persons can be generated. DEVELOPMENT The first assumption is that communicative development proceeds from intentional communicative signals with a performative value, to those with a representational or referential value, to combinations of symbols according to rules (i.e. linguistic production proper), regardless of the modality of realization -- vocal or gestural.1 A related assumption is that language is a two-level system;,that the deep, semantic level is independent of the surface level where meaning is expressed. Empirical support for these assumptions comes from studies of the early communicative development of hearing children. (For comparison of Italian children with American children Fall 1986 SLS 52 MWB & MMM : 203 see the studies made at the Institute of Psychology of the CNR (Rome) in collaboration with the University of Colorado: Bates et al. 1975, 1979a, b, Camaioni et al. 1976.) The main findings are that initial communication develops in both the vocal and the gestural modalities in an interrelated and complementary way, and only later, when the vocal communication proper has become well established, does the gestural communication virtually disappear. On these grounds the prediction can be made that deaf children, under conditions of early exposure to sign language, would show the same developmental trend in the gestural modality as do hearing children in the vocal one: from performative gestures to referential gestures to context-independent signs and to their combination. Caselli (1983, 1985) and Volterra and Caselli (1985) studied a deaf child, of deaf signing parents, without any auditory prosthesis and untrained in spoken language, and compared her development with that of a hearing child of the same sex, age, and family background. The communicative development of the two children was substantially similar. At the beginning only performatives occurred, followed at...

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