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

The Development of Communication Functions in Deaf Infants of Hearing Parents

The Development of Communication Functions in Deaf Infants of Hearing Parents Diana Pien The development of effective communication skills is one of the primary goals of educational intervention programs for deaf children. One very important aspect of communication competence involves learning to use language for a variety of functions, including requesting actions, asking information-seeking questions, describing events, promising, and making jokes. Halliday (1975a, 1975b, 1978) proposed that language learning begins as soon as the child systematically uses actions and vocalizations to achieve a specific goal. Initially, a given vocalization and/or gesture is used exclusively for a single function so that function equals use. The transition to the adult linguistic system occurs as the child begins to develop more generalized functional categories, first through the acquisition of grammar and later through the adoption of linguistic roles such as questioner, narrator, and respondent/informer. Halliday argued that prelinguistic acts are first used for the following four communicative functions: 1. Instrumental: "I want." The child expresses his or her demands and desires (e.g., points and reaches toward a cookie). 2. Regulatory: "Do as I tell you." The child explicitly tries to control the actions of others (e.g., pats a chair and wants mother to sit down). 3. Interactional: "You and me." The child uses speech or gestures for primarily social or affective communication (e.g., says "Hi"). 4. Personal: "Here I come." The child expresses his or her feelings, interests, and actions (e.g., says "Cat!" while looking at a cat). These functions can be expressed nonlinguistically by using gestures, pointing, or uttering systematic vocalizations, as well as through conventional words. Later in the one-word stage, the following two functions appear: 1. Heuristic: "Tell me why." The child demands and learns names for objects (e.g., asks "Da?" while pointing to an object). 2. Imaginative: "Let's pretend." The child creates a world of his or her own through sound play, make-believe (e.g., sings "la-Ia-Ia"). In Halliday's model the most sophisticated and final linguistic function to develop is the informative function whereby the speaker imparts new information that is unknown to the listener. This function involves the The complete version of this paper is available in microfiche or hard copy from ERIC Document Reproduction Service. Ask for Document No. ED 247 723. 30 narration of past and future events and does not include requests for absent objects or persons. All the earlier functions represent the use of language in contexts that exist independently of the linguistic system. But the informative function has no existence independent of language itself (Halliday, 1975a, p. 31). The informative function requires both the ability to create a mental representation of an event and also skill in role taking; the speaker must adopt the linguistic role of narrator or exchanger of information, as in asking-and-telling. Thus, Halliday not only provides a detailed model of the development of linguistic functions, but he also provides a framework for placing language in its social-cognitive context. The present paper applied Halliday'S model in analyzing the development of communication functions in 5 deaf infants having hearing parents. The 5 deaf children were enrolled in a parent-infant intervention program using total communication with children between the ages of 16 and 29 months. Three 20-40-minute videotapes of each child in a free-play situation with his or her parents were analyzed for this study. The first videotaped session occurred at program-entry and the last two videotapes were made at program-exit at age 3 years. The functions of all the children's gestures, pointing responses, communicative vocalizations, and signs were coded using adaptations of Halliday's categories of language functions. The data from the present study in general support Halliday's order of functional development. For all five children, the instrumental, regulatory, interactional, and personal functions seemed to develop prior to the heuristic , imaginative, and informative functions as predicted by Halliday's model. The present data, however, differed from his theory in that the development of the latter three functions was not necessarily concurrent with the development of syntax (i.e., combination of signs and/or gestures to form multisign utterances; Hoffmeister, Moores, & Ellenburger, 1975). Syntax did not appear to be sufficient for the use of language for the imaginative , heuristic, and informative functions because all five children produced multisignlgesture utterances in the last two videotapes, but only one child productively used these three functions. The late appearance...