Advances in Cognition, Education, and Deafness

The Understanding of Time by Deaf Pupils

The Understanding of Time by Deaf Pupils Irmina Kaiser-Grodecka Jadwiga Cieszynska In psychology, the issue of time focuses upon the experience of past, present, future, simultaneity, and duration. It is also possible to divide the question of time into two complementary concepts: (1) time as an order of events or as relation of the type now, earlier, later, and (2) time as duration or as the experience of the measure of time. Orientation to time and mastery of the fundamentals of the time system are acquired through education. Educators claim that a child needs about twelve years to grasp time concepts and how our fundamental time system works, but the child will not master its details completely. Even children who can hear and speak have difficulty in understanding the relationships between time and velocity, or the inclusion of one duration time in another. It is also difficult for them to overcome the tendency to present the time sequence of phenomena so that it agrees with the order of spatial sequence. In the course of development, however, children surmount the barriers and start to use historical and prehistorical time; when they get older, they comprehend sidereal time, and finally a moment comes in their education when time is explained to pupils in terms of relativity theory. However, in a special school for the deaf, both the younger pupils and the older ones ask questions and behave in ways that indicate that their understanding of time and related concepts is inadequate, incomplete, and often virtually nonexistent . This fact not only seriously complicates the teaching process, but also disturbs the children's social functioning. In their everyday experience, teachers observe deaf children's inability to abandon in their thoughts the "here and now" for the sake of different time, even 201 202 Cognitive Development time that refers to important events in childhood. The deaf child's time is viewed to be oriented toward the present. However, the lack of grammatical tenses in the natural sign language used by Polish deaf children does not reflect a lack of time awareness. Even in cultures in which no clear conceptualization of time may be encountered, the awareness of time does exist (Whitrow 1979). Consequently, we should pose the question, What kind of intuition lies behind the time concepts created by deaf children? For the understanding of distance and time relationships, historical events, and causal connections, it is necessary to create a sense of historical time. It is not actually experienced time, but an abstract category whose creation necessitates understanding of time experienced here and now. Thus, the time being experienced is primary to historical time, which is secondary. Secondary time cannot appear in the child's mind before primary time is crystallized. Observing mistakes in understanding of primary time leads to the conclusion that the deaf child has little sense of historical time or that the created concepts are inadequate. In the adopted two-level model of time, the primary level consists of the following categories: 1. Understanding and feeling of the cyclic flow of time that evolves culturally (e.g., the division of a day according to meals or other fixed activities, division of the year into school and holidays, etc.). 2. The feeling of time flowing in accordance with measurable time units, such as those used in a clock or a calendar. 3. Ability to move from the "here and now" to the past and to the future. 4. Understanding the inclusion of one duration of time with another (e.g., older-younger relationships and grasping generation connections in a family). Although the first two categories are based mainly on learning and memory, the remaining categories are intuitionally shaped in the child's mind and are marked by high individualism. The first stage of our investigations reported in this paper consisted of the evaluation of Polish deaf pupils' understanding of those temporal concepts that function within the third category of primary time. Twelve-year-old deaf and hearing children and IS-year-old deaf children were studied. In the first experiment they had to answer 13 questions (given in writing and translated into sign language) about some remote events from both the past and the future. Both 12-year-olds and older deaf children experienced serious difficulty in correctly using simple time concepts. We graded answers flexibly (the children could answer either in sign language or in writing, and we tolerated grammatical mistakes), yet we were surprised by the large proportion of incorrect...