Georgia State University Series

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Georgia State University Series

• The Impact of a Hearing Loss on Development

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Affected Areas

• Language Learning
• Education

• Social-Emotional Development
• Cognition
• Communication

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Language Learning

• Comprehension and production are
  separate issues
• The communication needs of the child provide the
  semantic and pragmatic base for instruction in
  grammar.

• Normal language development forms the scope
  and sequence of instruction in the
  grammatical aspects of language.

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Language Learning (Continued)

• Teachers need to help students generalize
  language skills to novel situations.
• To impart language in its richness and
  usefulness, there must be two-way communication.
• The child must experience the meaning of language
  in many ways.
• Input must be comprehensible.

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Comparing Receptive and Expressive Language of
Children Both With and Without Hearing Loss.

• Children whose hearing loss was identified by 6
  months of
• age had significantly better scores than those
• identified after 6 months of age.
• In those with normal cognitive abilities, this
  statistical
• difference was independent of age, gender,
  ethnicity,
• communication mode, degree of hearing loss,
  socioeconomic
• group, or the presence or absence of other
  disabilities.

Univ. of Colorado Study by Yoshinaga-Itano
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Education

• THE DEAF CHILDS FIRST CLASSROOM IS THE HOME

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What Deaf Children Learn

• Attention
• Responsiveness
• Consistency
• Predictability
• Attachment

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 Infant Development in All Areas

• 1 month- Social/Emotional Development
• 2 months- Motor Development
• 5 months- Cognitive Development
• 10-12 mo.- Play Development
• 10-12 mo.- Pre-literacy Development

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• Language and intelligence are seen as intimately
  intertwined, such that language development
  drives intellectual development as much
  intellectual development drives language
  development.

Akamatsu, C. Tane and Musselman, Carol. (1990).
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Long Term Effect of Education on Hearing Loss

•  With Early Intervention
•      at age 2 child has age- appropriate levels
  in language, motor, and cognitive skills

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Without Early Intervention

• Most deaf children begin school with a limited
  language and knowledge base.
• Age 2 is year of Language Explosion-same time
  typical deaf child is identified
•  

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Social-emotional Development

• Deaf children could be considered to be
  impulsive, egocentric, or socially immature.
  This is due to experiencing limited communication
  in their family environment

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• Deafness in itself
• does not lead to
• poor social
• competence poor
• and limited
• communication
• results in poor
• social competence.

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• For deaf children or others who have experienced
  delays in language, the inability to
  spontaneously mediate experience and label
  aspects of emotional states leads to increasingly
  serious gaps in social-emotional development.

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• As a group, deaf children show significant
  deficits when compared with hearing children in
  such areas as impulse control, self-esteem, the
  ability to interpret facial expressions, and
  moral development.

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Imagine how difficult it would be to have a
strong, positive self-concept if
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• (1) one often did not understand what was
  happening and why,

(2) one had a limited vocabulary to express
internal feelings, and
(3) one always felt dependent upon others to
solve ones own problems!
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Cognition

• Research suggests that deaf children are more
  likely to have greater difficulties when language
  is required but not necessarily when tasks are
  nonverbal.

• In general, deaf children show delays in the
  development of emotional understanding.

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Communication

• For communication to be effective, it must be
  directed specifically to deaf children, who must
  pay close visual attention. Deafness itself
  limits some avenues of incidental learning.