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The traditional view of deafness and deaf patients and families is based on a pathological perspective of deafness rather than a cultural perspective. The purpose of this article is to offer advanced practice nurses an alternative approach to this often misunderstood community of patients who have their own unique language, values, and experiences.
Language ordinarily emerges in young children as a consequence of both linguistic experience (for example, exposure to a spoken or signed language) and innate abilities (for example, the ability to acquire certain types of language patterns). One way to discern which aspects of language acquisition are controlled by experience and which arise from innate factors is to remove or manipulate linguistic input. However, experimental manipulations that involve depriving a child of language input are impossible. The present work examines the communication systems resulting from natural situations of language deprivation and thus explores the inherent tendency of humans to build communication systems of particular kinds, without any conventional linguistic input. We examined the gesture systems that three isolated deaf Nicaraguans (ages 14-23 years) have developed for use with their hearing families. These deaf individuals have had no contact with any conventional language, spoken or signed. To communicate with their families, they have each developed a gestural communication system within the home called "home sign." Our analysis focused on whether these systems show evidence of the grammatical category of Subject. Subjects are widely considered to be universal to human languages. Using specially designed elicitation tasks, we show that home signers also demonstrate the universal characteristics of Subjects in their gesture productions, despite the fact that their communicative systems have developed without exposure to a conventional language. These findings indicate that abstract linguistic structure, particularly the grammatical category of Subject, can emerge in the gestural modality without linguistic input.
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BACKGROUND AND AIMS: The Ward Infant Language Screening Test, Assessment, Acceleration and Remediation (WILSTAAR) comprises a programme for identifying and helping 8-10-month-old infants showing early signs of language and communication difficulty. The study addresses one of the queries raised by critics of the programme by providing evidence about the backgrounds and home environments of infants who fail the WILSTAAR screening assessment. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: Thirty 10-month-old infants who failed the screen ('at-risk' infants) and 30 gender- and age-matched infants who passed the screen ('not-at-risk' infants) were visited at home by a trained observer who collected information about the infants' physical and social environment and families' demographic features. OUTCOMES AND RESULTS: Parents of both groups were well educated, in stable relationships, and had no evidence of social or economic disadvantage. Measures of ambient sound level and television exposure did not support the hypothesis that the at-risk infants' environments involved high levels of noise. However, observations of spontaneous behaviour and a standardized Mother-Infant Play Task identified low amounts of social interaction in at-risk cases. During the play task, mothers of at-risk infants spent twice as much time without interacting with their infants. At-risk infants babbled one-third less than not-at-risk infants during 150-min observations of spontaneous behaviour. CONCLUSIONS: The findings point to deficiencies in social interaction and communication, involving both infant and parental contributions, as maintaining the infants' difficulties at this age. The core of the WILSTAAR intervention, of encouraging social communication between parents and infants, is not complex and does not need to be confined to at-risk cases. How this is best accomplished in the general community, and whether it should be included in national schemes such as Sure Start in the UK, are important topics for practitioners and policy-makers.
We have previously proposed that cortical auditory-vocal networks of the monkey brain can be partly homologized with language networks that participate in the phonological loop. In this paper, we suggest that other linguistic phenomena like semantic and syntactic processing also rely on the activation of transient memory networks, which can be compared to active memory networks in the primate. Consequently, short-term cortical memory ensembles that participate in language processing can be phylogenetically tracked to more simple networks present in the primate brain, which became increasingly complex in hominid evolution. This perspective is discussed in the context of two current interpretations of language origins, the "mirror-system hypothesis" and generativist grammar.
Traditionally, models of speech comprehension and production do not depend on concepts and processes from the phonological short-term memory (pSTM) literature. Likewise, in working memory research, pSTM is considered to be a language-independent system that facilitates language acquisition rather than speech processing per se. We discuss couplings between pSTM, speech perception and speech production, and we propose that pSTM arises from the cycling of information between two phonological buffers, one involved in speech perception and one in speech production. We discuss the specific role of these processes in speech processing, and argue that models of speech perception and production, and our understanding of their neural bases, will benefit from incorporating them.
Language acquisition is one of the most fundamental human traits, and it is obviously the brain that undergoes the developmental changes. During the years of language acquisition, the brain not only stores linguistic information but also adapts to the grammatical regularities of language. Recent advances in functional neuroimaging have substantially contributed to systems-level analyses of brain development. In this Viewpoint, I review the current understanding of how the "final state" of language acquisition is represented in the mature brain and summarize new findings on cortical plasticity for second language acquisition, focusing particularly on the function of the grammar center.
This study was an investigation of the role of language proficiency and automatization of language skills in the use of spontaneous rehearsal strategies by children who are deaf. Thirty-one profoundly deaf children, 7 to 13 years old, were given a serial recall task, a test of language proficiency (the Language Proficiency Profile-I), and a rapid automatized naming (RAN) task. Similar to previous studies, when the data were examined by age, an apparent developmental lag was observed in the children's spontaneous use of a cumulative rehearsal strategy. Logistic regression analyses further demonstrated that age was actually a nonsignificant predictor of rehearsal use, but that both language proficiency and the automatization of language skills were highly significant predictors. In subsequent hierarchical analyses, automatized language was a partial mediator of the language proficiency --> rehearsal use relation. These results provided support for the view that automatization of language skills is an important and perhaps necessary contribution to the relation between language proficiency and rehearsal use, but that other additional aspects of language proficiency also affect the child's use of a strategy. These findings were discussed in relation to Cummins' (1984) model of language proficiency.
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Fingerspelling is a system of manually representing the graphemes of a spoken language used by members of Deaf communities worldwide. Yet, at least within the North American educational system, fingerspelling appears to be largely discounted in favor of sign usage, despite its high potential for linkage to the orthographical system of English and literacy development. The author describes fingerspelling in connection with how it is used within the American Deaf community, and also describes the development of fingerspelling skills in deaf (and hearing) children. He also describes how deaf adults use fingerspelling to promote literacy development in young deaf children. Strategies for increasing the use of fingerspelling by teachers and parents of the Deaf are outlined.
Overall, research studies of self-esteem and deafness yield inconsistent findings. Some studies indicate a higher incidence of low self-esteem among deaf individuals than among hearing individuals (Bat-Chava, 1994; Mulcahy, 1998; Schlesinger, 2000). Other findings suggest that one must examine this complex phenomenon more closely to understand how deafness influences self-concept and self-esteem (Bat-Chava, 2000; Emerton, 1998; Foster, 1998; Munoz-Baell & Ruiz, 2000; Stone, 1998). This study asked whether self-esteem scores are significantly different among deaf college students compared across groups based on gender and parents' hearing status and signing ability. The construct of self-esteem was measured by the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, administered using an American Sign Language-translated videotape. Results revealed that gender, age, and the interaction of parent by gender were nonsignificant. However, respondents who had at least one deaf parent and signed scored significantly higher than those with hearing parents who could not sign and those with hearing parents who could sign. Overall, self-esteem scores for all respondents were high. Implications for further study are discussed.
Data from a qualitative study on the literacy development of preschool hard-of-hearing and deaf children were analyzed to discover how the children learned to read, write, and spell or fingerspell their names. The research was conducted for 9 months in two preschool classes for hard-of-hearing and deaf children. Four hard-of-hearing and three deaf children participated. Data sources included extensive descriptive and interpretive field notes on classroom observations of the children, and drawing and writing samples from the children. Analysis revealed that the children learned that names are powerful expressions of identity through teacher demonstrations, immersion in a literacy-rich environment, and numerous opportunities to explore written language.
Fifteen videotaped conversations of a chimpanzee signing with his trainers were examined in order to determine (a) whether the ape was using imitation to learn about new language forms as some human children do and (b) whether the ape's nonimitative utterances implied knowledge of linguistic structures. The answers to both questions were negative. The evidence suggests that the utterances lacked the semantic and syntactic organization found in the utterances of most children. Instead of learning to use signs as symbols for communicating propositional messages, the ape learned to use gestures as nonsymbolic instrumental responses under the stimulus control of objects in the signing context and verbal and nonverbal cues from the trainers. Other research now underway with chimpanzees may eventually reveal whether this performance is characteristic of chimpanzees in general or is the result of particular training strategies used to teach language to chimpanzees.
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Students need educational programs which foster maximum development of their personal knowledge, skill, and competence. To accomplish this, they should have access to a well-balanced curriculum, effective instruction and opportunities to succeed. In accordance with this philosophy, the 67th and 68th Legislatures of the State of Texas (1981-1984) established rules and procedures for the implementation of a state basic curriculum. Under this mandate, school districts are required to implement the provisions of these rules in "a manner which will enable all students to participate actively in a well-balanced curriculum and master, to the best of their ability, the knowledge, skills, and competencies established through the essential elements," in order to become accredited by the Texas Education Agency. To meet these requirements and make the goals wholly appropriate for hearing-impaired students in Texas, the Division of Services for the Deaf of the Texas Education Agency developed an in-depth expansion of these state-mandated essential elements in the area of English Language Arts, grades K-8. This expansion, the Supplement to the Essential Elements for the Hearing Impaired (SEE-HI) includes the original language arts essential elements as well as supplemental goals and sub-goals necessary for students who have language deficiencies, especially those caused by hearing loss.