Chapter 4 (page 67) states that some deaf children born to hearing families may be exposed to no signing at all until they reach school age. Therefore they are unable to learn language in a natural way through absorbing it from their environment like other children are able to do. The book continued to say that children who are born to deaf parents and began signing early on did significantly better on false-belief tasks than deaf children who belonged to hearing parents. My question is, in addition to this particular task would deaf children who don't begin signing until later not have other activities that they don't perform as well in. Wouldn't they have many different impairments due to how late they are beginning to learn and understand language, which the book said, if they were lucky would be in preschool (where they still won't be at least 4 or 5)? In particular in the area of language, would these kids who have no exposure to language before not be extremely language impaired in some aspects? I would think that not being able to communicate for your beginning years and then learning to sign later would be a very difficult and harmful on children.
Comments (1)
Since there is a critical period for sign language acquisition, it would make sense that children who don't learn how to sign right away might have problems fully learning it later on. Although they might begin to learn sign language in preschool, I think they still might have a problems catching up to kids their age. If they didn't really have any experience producing language before this age, I would also think it would be difficult to start doing other tasks correctly.
Posted by Wendy Paddock | April 18, 2008 5:26 PM
Posted on April 18, 2008 17:26