HEARING, MOTHER FATHER DEAF: Hearing People in Deaf Families

Sociolinguistic Aspects of the Communication Between Hearing Children and Deaf Parents

162 Sociolinguistic Aspects of the Communication Between Hearing Children and Deaf Parents Andrea Wilhelm The quality of communication within a family plays a significant role in a child’s emotional and social development. Many researchers have examined the communication patterns between hearing children of Deaf parents (Codas) and their parents, focusing primarily on the acquisition of spoken language.1 However, their findings do not explain why some hearing children of Deaf parents communicate with their Deaf parents in an insufficient way, even though their parents use sign language with each other. Communication within families is a highly complex matter that involves the attitudes and behavior of individuals in a society. These attitudes can affect the language interaction between Deaf and hearing people and can be regarded as one of the primary factors to explain the use or lack of use of sign language.2 This chapter discusses Deaf people’s position in German society and the significance of sign language, with This chapter is an abridged and revised version of my master’s thesis, Soziolinguistische Aspekte der Kommunikation zwischen hörenden Kindern und gehörlosen Eltern (Sociolinguistic Aspects of the Communication between Hearing Children and Deaf Parents). The thesis was written in 2002 as part of my M.A. degree in linguistics at the University of Cologne in Germany. 1. Leonhardt and Grüner (1997; 2001), both educators of Deaf and hard of hearing students, worked on the project “Language development of hearing children or profoundly hearing-impaired and Deaf parents.” They summarize the results of Schiff and Ventry (1976), Schiff (1979), and Murphy and Slorach (1983) who also examined the spoken language acquisition of Kodas (kids of deaf adults) and their dysfunctions. 2. For an enlightening review article on Deaf parents and their hearing children from an American perspective, see Singleton and Tittle (2000). particular emphasis on Codas’ sense of belonging to the hearing world or the Deaf world and how that influences their use of sign language. METHODOLOGY In order to establish a framework for describing what communication in Deaf-hearing families would possibly look like, I adopted, to a certain degree, Paul Preston’s interview method from his 1994 study. He interviewed 150 adult Codas throughout the United States to find out about their personal experiences with their Deaf parents. Like Preston, I have Deaf parents and have been able to observe the communication between my Deaf parents and four hearing siblings. Furthermore, I have nine Coda cousins, whose communication situation with their Deaf parents I can also assess. The potential disadvantages of being an insider, which might weaken the research’s scientific objectivity, may be balanced by the advantages due to my experiences as an insider (e.g., by inspiring more openness in the interviews). In his study, Preston (1994) did not thematically restrict his openly designed questionnaire; I conducted guided interviews as opposed to research with a standardized questionnaire. Guided interviews offer “an ample scope to include unexpected questions or subjects from a new interview situation or to filter from the interview interpretation also topics which were not anticipated in the design of the guided interview” (Bortz & Döring, 1995, 289).3 An interview may also unravel memory gaps by asking for “retrospective introspection” (ibid., 292). It may further trigger direct reactions to partly unpleasant questions that can also be interpreted (Friedrichs, 1990, 203) within a study. Due to the limited number of participants, this study cannot be considered representative. It is further limited by the fact that I did not observe actual parent-child interactions or language use, but rather the recollection of that linguistic behavior and the accompanying perspective of each Coda. It should also be considered that in this study, only Codas with hearing grandparents were interviewed. Accordingly, this Sociolinguistic Aspects of Communication : 163 3. German original citation: “[. . .] genügend Spielraum, spontan aus der Interviewsituation heraus neue Fragen und Themen einzubeziehen oder bei der Interviewauswertung auch Themen herauszufiltern, die bei der LeitfadenKonzeption nicht antizipiert wurden.” 164 : an d r e a wi l h e l m work can be regarded as a pilot project with an exploring and preparatory character for future field studies.4 Collected Data I found four of the five study participants with the help of a Deaf informant. Sending a fax (containing the interview request) to six Deafhearing families resulted in a rate of return of 50 percent. Three adult hearing children responded, and one responder...