Cognition, Education, and Deafness: Directions for Research and Instruction

Analysis

Analysis Anthony B. Wolff The traditional literature on deafness is replete with studies that ostensibly demonstrate cognitive deficits among deaf subjects (e.g., Pintner & Paterson , 1917). With few exceptions, however, more recent analyses have found that these deficits are generally attributable to such factors as certain linguistic competencies and secondary handicaps. Contemporary scholarship does not predict a difference between the basic cognitive apparatus of deaf and hearing individuals on a neural or structural level. Nevertheless, the studies reported in part 5 all attempt to shed light on the manner in which deaf subjects process information, either implicitly or explicitly, in comparison to hearing subjects. Happily, these papers avoid, to some extent, simple deaf/hearing comparisons and focus instead on analyses of strategies. Each paper in its own way attempts to explore the ability of deaf subjects to infer, classify, conceptualize, or generalize. Two of the papers also examine recall. Despite wide differences among subject groups, these papers on the whole demonstrate a resounding lack of difference between deaf and hearing people. Brown and Dell found that in paraphrasing experimental anecdotes, deaf and hearing college students showed similar patterns of reference to objects that had previously been mentioned. Their recall for such objects was also rather similar. The small reported deficit in recall of these objects by deaf subjects may have been an artifact of communication differences or a result of the very small (possibly unrepresentative) size of the comparison subgroup of hearing subjects. In several studies of memory strategies, Liben found that deaf children of various ages displayed the usual rehearsal strategies in a sequentiallearning paradigm. They also showed semantic clustering in a free-recall paradigm, similar to what has been demonstrated in the past for hearing children. Liben also found that deaf adults tended to categorize both English words and ASL signs based on meaning rather than on formational similarity . This finding is again analogous to previous data for hearing subjects. Friedman's comparison of classification skills ostensibly compares deaf and hearing preschoolers. In attempting to classify concrete objects on both superficial (perceptual) and specific categorical (basic) principles, the two groups performed similarly. This result was not replicated when a more general, abstract (superordinate) principle was suggested to the subjects; but this difference may have related more to Friedman's subject selection practices than to any inherent differences between deaf and hearing children . Specifically, deaf subjects were chosen in such a way that a linguistic deficit was assured, while hearing subjects were chosen for at least average oral receptive skills. This contrast suggests that the obtained group difference was not necessarily attributable to hearing status, but rather to communication skills and their concomitants. Moreover, the results of Liben's 79 Cognitive Strategies and Processes similar sorting task yielded no differences between deaf and hearing children , thus suggesting subjects' adequate mastery of a small set of superordinate categories. The work reported by Knobloch-Gala and Kaiser-Grodecka again examined classification or concept formation behavior in deaf children. Rather than compare their deaf subjects to hearing controls, these authors compared three modes of presentation: verbal (written form), iconic (graphid visual), and demonstration of task. Not surprisingly, the more visually graphic stimuli proved more conducive to learning classificatory principles than the written stimuli. This result is espe~ially interesting in light of the heavy oral emphasis in Polish deaf education today. Synthesizing the various findings in part 5 leads us to the conclusion that, after controlling for mode of presentation or communication system, deaf subjects generally resemble hearing subjects insofar as their capacity for abstraction, categorization, and serial recall are concerned. As with hearing people, deaf people have at their disposal a range of processing strategies and a constructive hierarchy of concepts that allow them to make sense of the world. However, several questions now arise from these papers. Deafness is not a unitary phenomenon. Nearly one third of the prelingually hearing-impaired U.S. population manifests some form of additional handicap. Liben is unfortunately silent on the presence or absence of such conditions in her subjects. If multihandicapped individuals were included, it would have been interesting to know how task performance was related to condition. If such people were excluded from the subject pool, a replication with, for example, deaf children who were also diagnosed as learning disabled would be of value. In contrast, Friedman's subjects represent a narrow band of deaf children. Although her study therefore lacks some generalizability, her work does seem to say something significant about the...