Language development in exceptional circumstances: Auditory Impairment

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Language development in exceptional circumstances: Auditory Impairment

The study of child language acquisition became of interest to psycholinguists in the 1960’s after Chomsky’s suggestion that the study of the development of language would provide evidence for theories of language. Ever since these initial studies, theorists have used the development of child language to study issues such as the contexts of interaction in which language arises and the importance of parental input. After the explosion of interest in language acquisition linguists began to take an interest in the development of language (more specifically sign language) in deaf children. By examining a selection of these studies I will attempt to discuss the implications of the studies in comparison to language acquisition theories.

Deafness or the extent of deafness is generally not confirmed until the child reaches age one. Surprisingly, despite their auditory impairment deaf babies coo and babble in the same way as babies with normal hearing and follow Stark’s stages of vocal pronunciation until approximately 9 months. Up until this point the infants cry, coo, laugh and babble. They also use the same phonetic inventory as hearing children which consists mainly of nasals and stops. At the age of approximately 9 months the infants begin to produce more labials, this is presumably because they can rely upon visual cues, but their speech soon begins to disappear.

To begin with I will confirm my definition of deaf infants as those who have congenital hearing impairments with a severity of 90db or more. As a result of auditory impairment these children, who have very little residual hearing cannot hear the speech of people around them. (Berko-Gleason 2001: 248)

Children born to deaf parents learn sign language as a mother tongue or first language and it becomes a natural method of communication. Infants learning sign as their first language pass through similar syntactic stages at the same points in their development as children exposed to spoken language. They begin with the holophrastic stage of language and develop telegraphic speech, omitting function words and most of the inflectional morphology. By age 5 all essential functions of formal sign language are acquired.

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Bellugi and Klima’s (1972) study ‘Pola’ can be used to demonstrate. Pola was a deaf infant born to deaf parents and therefore exposed to sign language from Birth. Bellugi and Klima discovered that before the age of 3 Pola used the signs: name, stay, tomorrow, will, where, who, what how, dead, know, understand, none, nothing, don’t know and had the same amount of ‘signs’ to her exposal as would a hearing child with words. Pola had already learned the hand alphabet and could sign this clearly. Bellugi and Klima also found early combinations of signs which contained the full ...

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