The Interaction of Gesture and Speech in the Language Development of Two Profoundly Deaf Children

Abstract

Most deaf children are born into families in which there is no history of hearing impairment. Hence they have no exposure to the manual communication used in the deaf community, and the spoken language used by the hearing community in which they live is inaccessible to them. Even with amplification, the auditory signal is distorted and incomplete and the lipreading pattern is ambiguous and often impossible to interpret. Under these conditions, deaf children do not acquire spoken language effortlessly as hearing children do. Each word has to be laboriously taught and learned. Language acquisition becomes an arduous and frustrating task and one in which they are frequently unsuccessful. It has long been recognized that because of this hearing-impaired children resort to the use of gestural communication. Heider and Heider (1941), for example, reported that 4- to 6-year-old deaf children used few spoken words, but communicated with each other quite effectively by means of gestures, pantomime, and facial expression. Although the use of nonverbal communication was acknowledged, the prevailing oral education philosophy decreed that all means of communication other than speech be regarded as inferior and not worthy of further investigation. Interest was therefore directed exclusively to the child’s acquisition of spoken language. However, as this was frequently very limited and difficult to transcribe accurately because of the distorted speech of deaf children, most research rested heavily on the production of written language and was consequently restricted to school age children.

Man, full of wisdom and divinity, could have appeared nothing superior to a naked trunk or block, had he not been adorned with the hand as the interpreter and messenger of his thoughts…. Since Nature has furnished us with two instruments for the purpose of bringing into light and expressing the silent affections of the mind, language and the hand, it has been the opinion of learned and intelligent man that the former would be maimed and nearly useless without the latter; whereas the hand, without the aid of language, has produced many and wonderful effects. Cresollius, 1620, (Quoted in Critchley, 1975)