Hearing Loss and Deafness

The majority of deaf youngsters do not receive infant intervention and early exposure to ASL. When they do, the language patterns of children learning ASL from early infancy closely parallel the developmental progression of hearing children acquiring oral language. Infants learning ASL as a first language generally develop their first signed words at about the same age and sometimes even earlier than children learning an oral language. The two-word stage in ASL learning has some semantic features similar to the production of telegraphic speech among toddlers learning oral language. Overregularization of grammatical features ("I falled down") and overextension of word meanings (for example, calling all men "daddy") occur among toddlers whether they are using manual signs or oral speech.

Research suggests that knowing ASL early as a first language aids deaf children in developing better skills with the English language. Orally educated deaf children of hearing parents have been found to outperform manually educated children of hearing parents. This may mean that parental mastery of the language used in the earliest transactions with a child is most important for a young child's developing language skills.

Some drawbacks to education for deaf infants occur when hearing parents have not learned to use ASL or they use it infrequently and provide only simple Depending on the severity of hearing loss, a child may benefit from using a hearing aid. (L. Steinmark, Custom Medical Stock Photo) signs. In addition, the variety of existing signing systems can be a serious source of frustration and inconsistency for children. Support for and educational opportunities for parents and caring family members to learn sign language should be an important goal of intervention programs for deaf infants.

Families and educators have differed historically in promoting different educational approaches to help deaf children develop language. Oralist programs emphasize that deaf children are best served by learning to read lips, by auditory training to use residual hearing as much as possible, and by articulation training to improve spoken enunciation.

Manual systems are urged by those who believe that some deaf children will have a poor educational prognosis with only oral methods. Use of manually coded English (such as finger spelling and ASL) in combination with speech is called total communication. Quigley and King provided an overview in 1982 of the half-dozen most commonly used sign systems.

Most of these systems share the common feature of adapting some ASL signs for vocabulary items. They invent new signs, for example, for plurals and as affixes for expressing verb tense and number agreement. ASL has fewer such elements. Reduplicated movement in ASL signals the progressive aspect, whereas some sign systems prefer to invent more movements to get closer to standard English, as in signing "The dog is barking" (in ASL this would be signed as "Dog bark, bark, bark").

Although sign systems are now an integral part of the curriculum for most deaf children, educational opportunities for the very young deaf child may be severely limited if a child is not participating in an educational program and if the parents themselves have limited knowledge of or use of sign systems.