Letters to the Editor

Comments, Questions, and Answers Hillview Ave., P.O. Box 10099, Palo Alto, CA, 94304—excerpt from On the Green, house organ at Gallaudet College. QUESTION—Phoenix House was established 15 months ago as a state-licensed therapeutic residential facility for pre- and early-adolescent boys with emotional and/or hearing handicaps . . . The Phoenix treatment plan is structured upon the concept of intermixing hearingimpaired children with emotional and/or educational handicaps together with average-to-high academic functioning hearing children with severe emotional handicaps . . . We have shown that children from diverse backgrounds and circumstances can be unified into an affectionate, effective, and highly therapeutic "family." We are now interested in publishing some of our results. Thus we need to research the literature available on the subject. Can you assist in this endeavor? Lawrence T. Rhyne, Dir. Phoenix Youth-Action Fdtn. REPLY—The ERIC computer search and the Annals, already suggested to you, seem the best direction in which to start. ERIC should be available at your library. The Annals is indexed annually in the December issue. The American Deafness and Rehabilitation Association publicatons , Journal of Rehabilitation of the Deaf and the annual Deafness, will probably be helpful also. Happy searching. QUESTION—Many people ask me just what is an oral interpreter for the deaf. Perhaps you can explain here to assist other inquirers. It seems to me that the title is a misnomer. Lucinda E. Shupe, CSC Arnold, Md. REPLY—Since the oral "interpreter" is repeating in English the essence of what the speaker is saying in English, it would seem that the process is one of transliteration rather than interpreting . Dennis Cokeley describes the term in Sign Language and the Deaf Community, recently published by the National Association of the Deaf. However, Cokeley uses a slightly different situation: "... most often Sign Language interpreters find themselves in situations where they are transmitting messages from spoken English to some manual representation of spoken English. This process, (which is called transliteration) is unique to Sign Language interpretation. It would be equivalent, for example, to a spoken language interpreter hearing an English sentence and simply substituting German words for the English words ..." Letters to the Editor To the Editor: I would like to comment on the article "The Leiter Scales: A Review of Validity Findings" by Ratcliffe and Ratcliffe in the February 1979 issue of the American Annals. In this article they reviewed past validity research involving the LIPS and AALIPS and investigated the comparison of these two intelligence tests with the Stanford-Binet and Wechsler Scales. The implication was made that the LIPS and AALIPS "appeared to be scaled too low if either the Wechsler Full-Scale, Wechsler Performance Scale, or the Stanford-Binet are viewed as the more valid measure of general intelligence." The literature referred to by the authors utilized the following groups of children: children with no handicaps; brain damage, slow or retarded hearing children; hearing-impaired children. As far as the nonhearing-impaired group is concerned, the quote above supports the author's position. Out of 14 articles referred to that compared the LIPS, AALIPs with the Stanford-Binet and Wechsler, only one article provided data that dealt with the hearingimpaired population. This particular article was written by Ritter in Psychology in Schools, 1976, "Intellectual Estimates of Hearing Impaired Children: A Comparison of Three Measures." The hearingimpaired children in the Ritter paper were 5-7 to 7-11 years old. In contrast to all of the other articles referred to, the hearing-impaired children did better as a group on the Leiter than on the Wechsler. Furthermore, the other articles referred to dealt with a broader age range. It has been my experience in evaluation of hearing-impaired children from age 6 to 8-6, the hearing-impaired children tend to earn better scores on the Leiter than the WISC-R Performance Scale. After age 8-6 the children tend to earn better scores on the WISC-R Performance Scale. I am bothered by the authors' failure to comment on this Ritter article. I recommend that caution should be exercised in the selection of tests for hearing-impaired children in 892 A.A.O. I October 1980 Letters to...