Madeline M. Maxwell

A Deaf Child's Natural Development of Literacy

This case study reports the first investigation of a young deaf child’s experiences with books. It describes six steps in a developmental sequence of seven stages, from simply labeling pictures and signs to reading independently. One of the most interesting aspects of development was the child’s spontaneous analysis of sign drawings in storybooks that illustrate each word with a sign. These sign drawings provided a bridge between signed and spoken discourse and print. Concepts she discovered about books include: stories are to be enjoyed and repeated; they are means both of social interaction and of private satisfaction; characters have styles of speaking and books have narration and dialogue; stories have plots. Concepts about print relate to directionality, letter patterns, and that print, signs, and speech interrelate.

The Synergy of Sign and Speech in Simultaneous Communication.

Many schools encourage deaf children to speak and sign simultaneously; however, there have been no satisfactory descriptions of this behavior. The research reported in this paper explored the correspondence between speech and sign and the resulting correspondence of the messages conveyed by each channel. The results suggest a synergistic model for this bimodally coded form of English.

Some functions and uses of literacy in the deaf community

Differences in patterns of literacy can be understood in terms of communicative needs as governed by culturally learned notions about the appropriateness of a given communicative mode for a given social activity and by practicality as determined by biological structures and processes. It is through literacy that the deaf person can share in the linguistic experiences of the society at large, since written language is not distorted by the handicapped auditory sense. This study provides the first analysis of the ways writing is used among the deaf and between deaf and hearing communicators. Four groups were consulted and observed: the social community of deaf adults who sign, families in which parents are hearing and at least one child is deaf, families in which parents are deaf and children are hearing or deaf, deaf and hearing schoolteachers. Families with hearing parents use virtually no writing, whereas families with deaf parents and deaf adults in general use writing for several functions. The reading abilities of deaf school leavers seldom exceed fourth grade level; nevertheless, deaf adults use writing daily for exchange of information in the home, in public, on the job, and for communication by means of a telephone adaptation with a keyboard. The uses of literacy are largely conversational, personal, and instrumental. Commercial print in the form of captioned television and movies is also available. Deaf children born to deaf parents are socialized into these uses. Deaf children born to hearing parents are not. Writing which occurs in classrooms with deaf children is largely limited to lesson work, even when teachers are deaf. Literacy programs should take into account the communicative needs of deaf adults and the patterns of literacy use in deaf families. (Literacy, deafness, crosscultural analysis, ethnography of communication)

Concurrent Cognitions During Conversations: Protocol Analysis as a Means of Exploring Conversations

Identifying the cognitive activities that occur as individuals interact is critical to understanding conversational processes. Previous attempts to explore peoples thoughts as they converse are inherently limited by an inability to tap into concurrent cognitions: those thoughts that occur simultaneously with listening and speaking. We propose and test a procedure to capture these concurrent thoughts by using netwoiied computers where individuals communicate with one another over terminals and simultaneously talk aloud their thoughts. Results demonstrate that this technique can offer evidence of cognitive activities such as inferencing and planning in conversation, as well as bolster the validity of certain conversational maxims that, up to now were assumed, but never actually demonstrated in collaborative discourse.

The Alphabetic Principle & Fingerspelling

Examination of a profoundly deaf child’s fingerspelling in more than 100 hours of interaction videotaped at intervals over six years reveals a gradual acquisition of the rules for fingerspelling and knowledge of the relation of fingerspelling to signs and to printed and spoken words. Some similarity is found to the (written) spelling of pre-school children who develop their own orthography (Read 1975). This case study of finger-spelling development may provide clues to the role of hearing in language and to the acquisition of a spoken-written language by those who cannot hear it.

Bimodal or Bilingual Communication

Anyone who has tried to learn sign as a second language is probably aware of the variety of sign codes in the U. S. In the literature, descriptions of American Sign Language (ASL) and of various invented signs systems for representing English are frequent however, descriptions of language variation and actual language use are infrequent. The data to be discussed in this paper are from an analysis of one signing code, Simultaneous Communication (SC).

The Acquisition of English Bound Morphemes in Sign Form

What is the role of perceptual salience in language acquisition? English represented in signed form has the same structural segments but differs in perceptual characteristics from English so represented The later acquisition of the syntactic morphemes aux and -ing by three previously studied deaf children has generally been attributed to the lack of perceptual salience in the signed forms. More extensive data from two other chil-dren of deaf parents reveal other differences in acquisition of -ing. ‘-s, -s, -d, and the particle to The conclusion from the new data is that the signs for representing these English morphemes have a very high perceptual salience but distortions in prosody that affect structure and meaning

Beginning reading and deaf children.

Reading instruction for hearing children builds on the language development that precedes school entry, but reading instruction for deaf children is often either a means of language introduction or a quick follow-up to new activities or new language. This article describes a reading program appropriate for the average deaf child without age-level language abilities. It has a top-down element that makes use of telling stories and reading aloud and creating narratives from the childs experiences with classmates, routines with picture books, functional literacy, and environmental print. It also has a bottom-up component that deals with letter identification, print concepts, letter sequences (spelling) and word recognition, and the mode of communication. The program is designed to foster independence in the child.

Simultaneous Communication in the Classroom: What Do Deaf Children Learn?

Recent researchers have investigated the nature of the simultaneous communication used by teachers of the deaf and by deaf children. One assumption behind the use of signed codes for English (i.e. Manual English) is that deaf students will recognize the signed-and-spoken communication as English and learn to speak, sign, and write English. This paper examines whether deaf students’ written English reflects their teachers’ use of English sign markers in simultaneous communication. The study required seven high school deaf students to write stories that had been presented to them in simultaneous communication. The students’ output and the teachers’ input were not identical but differed in ways consistent with principles familiar from studies of imitation in children and from semantic memory research.

Rethinking the Context of Language in the Schools

When taken together, the involvement strategies that operate on sound and meaning, coupled with the historical, spatial, thematic, and relational frames that make up the human world, help form an i...