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CHAPTER 15 The Interaction of Gesture and Speech in the Language Development of Two Profoundly Deaf Children H.MoHAY Introduction Man, full ofwisdom and divinity, could have appeared nothing superior to a naked trunk or block, had he not been adorned with the hand as the interpreter and messengerofhis thoughts.... Since Nature has furnished us with two instruments for the purpose of bringing into light and expressing the silent affections of the mind, language and the hand, it has been the opinion of learned and intelligent man that the former would be maimed and nearly useless without the latter; whereas the hand, without the aid of language, has produced many and wonderful effects. Cresollius, 1620, (Quoted in Critchley, 1975) Most deafchildren are born into families in which there is no history of hearing impairment. Hence they have no exposure to the manual communication used in the deafcommunity, and the spoken language used by the hearingcommunity in which they live is inaccessible to them. Even with amplification, the auditory signal is distorted and incomplete and the lipreading pattern is ambiguous and often impossible to interpret. Under these conditions, deaf children do not acquire spoken language effortlessly as hearing children do. Each word has to be laboriously taught and learned. Language acquisition becomes an arduous and frustrating task and one in which they are frequently unsuccessful. It has long been recognized that because of this hearing-impaired children resort to the use ofgesturalcommunication. Heiderand Heider(1941), for example, reported that 4- to 6-year-old deaf children used few spoken words, but communicated with each other quite effectively by means of gestures, pantomime, and facial expression . Although the use ofnonverbal communication was acknowledged, the prevailing oral education philosophy decreed that all means of communication other than speech be regarded as inferiorand not worthy offurther investigation. Interest was therefore directed exclusively to the child's acquisition of spoken language. However, as this was frequently very limited and difficult to transcribe accurately because ofthe distorted speech ofdeafchildren, most research rested heavily on the production ofwritten language and was consequently restricted to school age children. As a result, little information is available on the spoken language development of young hearing-impaired children. Lenneberg, Rebelsky, and Nichols (1965) and Lenneberg (1967) reported that as early as 6 months of age the vocalizationsofdeafinfants differ from those ofhearing infants in both frequency 188 H. Mohay of production and variety. These results were largely confirmed by Maskarinec, Cairns, Butterfield, and Weamer (1981), and Lack, Ling, Ling and Ship (1970) similarly noted that all seven ofthe hearing-impaired children in their study had abnormal voice quality when they commenced a preschool training program at ages ranging from 11 to 32 months. Thus it would seem that from an early age the vocal behavior of hearing-impaired children is different from that of hearing children and continues to be so as they struggle to acquire a spoken vocabulary. Both Pugh (1946) and Morkovin (1960) reported that the average spoken vocabulary of 4-year-old deaf children was less than 30 words, and advances in technology seem to have improved this only marginally. Gregory and Bishop (1982), for example, found that 16 of the 24 hearing-impaired children they studied entered school with a spoken vocabulary of fewer than 150 words, and Gregory and Mogford (1981) reported that the two profoundly deaf children whose language development they monitored from the time ofdiagnosis until 4 years ofage failed to acquire even ten words during this period. The moderately and severely hearing-impaired children in their sample did somewhat better with all of them attaining a spoken vocabulary in excess of 100 words before their 4th birthday. However, their first words were produced later than hearing children's and their rate ofword acquisition was slower. This was particularly evident after the acquisition ofthe first 50 words when the hearing-impaired children failed to show the burgeoning of vocabulary usually observed in hearing children at this stage of language acquisition. In spite of the emphasis on spoken (and written) language, sporadic reports on the gestural communication of deaf children did appear in the literature. Tervoort (1961) and Tervoort and Verbeck (1967), for example, presented a detailed analysis of the development and use of esoteric sign systems by hearing -impaired school children who were denied access to a formal sign language. Alittle later, Kuschel (1973) described the lexicon ofgestures invented by the only deaf man on a Polynesian island, and Scroggs (1981) documented the gestural narrative...

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