The Comparison of Deaf children and Hearing children Essay
The study of cognitive sphere of the deaf is a topic that has long interested many researchers. One of the main issues is the impact of deafness and the consequent difficulties of speech forming on the level of intellectual development. Deafness significantly affects the development of verbal thinking, as well as academic ability, as the education is largely associated with speech development. The results of many studies using different non-verbal techniques confirm that the deaf significantly fall behind in the studied parameters in comparison with hearing coevals (at least in primary school age).
In general, the study of this problem remains relevant for many years, since the number of children with disabilities increases, and according to the forecasts of the World Health Organization, this upward trend will continue.
Moreover, this all is being complicated by the society’s inadequate attitude to the problems of the disabled in general. Under the conditions of mass unemployment, employment of disabled individuals is becoming a virtually insoluble problem. If even the mind of a healthy person often cannot withstand this race, what can be expected from a person, let alone a child, who already in early childhood realizes its inferiority and maladjustment?
Thus, the object of study is the peculiarities of non-verbal intelligence. The objective of our study was to see how the presence of additional disorders affects the intellectual development of deaf children and whether children with only hearing impairment will significantly fall behind their hearing coevals.
Hearing disorder and its impact on learning process
The mechanism of hearing disorder
Among the elementary school pupils, we can often observe children who seemingly do not differ from other students: they are clever, understand the speech addressed to them, acquire an elementary account, properly behave in class, but for unknown at first glance reasons show difficulty in acquiring primary literacy, and having mastered basic reading and writing in a result of enormous efforts of teachers, continue to be non-achievers. Typically, in explanatory reading tasks, a child cannot answer teacher’s questions, and gradually, a student becomes withdrawn, isolated, whiny, and gives the impression of a child, prone to unmotivated stubbornness, or even seems to be mentally retarded. Such a child needs to pass hearing test.
Fortunately, a slight hearing loss for an adult does not bring particularly big inconvenience for the one. Most people need a hearing only for speech communication, and for this purpose, given sufficient speech literacy even defective hearing may often be successfully used (Harrington, 2010). Let us now try to imagine what the situation is with a child whose hearing was in some degree defective since an early age, that is, in the early years of life when the hearing serves not as much for communication as for mastering the first sounds, first words and phrases that make up the speech.
Normal child development requires a very high degree of hearing integrity, and an ear is a very delicate organ. Statistics show that one man out of three may have impaired hearing (Harrington, 2010). For a child to master the meaning of words, to distinguish between the sound compositions, it is necessary to have a high degree of hearing integrity. There is no reason to expect a child to complete words by guessing: naturally, for a child who learns words by hearing for the first time all of them are still unknown. To be able to try to repeat the words after the people around, a child needs to hear distinctly each of the words pronounced (Dorit, 2008).
If a child does not hear the speech sounds with sufficient clarity and consistency, the repeating words may seem different every time, and so they may not be associated with the objects they represent, and therefore their meaning may be not learned or learned not sufficiently (Martindale, 2007).
What is even more difficult for a child with defective hearing is to learn the pronunciation of sounds and words. Normally, as mentioned above, the child learns to imitate the pronunciation on the basis of hearing. Listening to the sounds of speech, the child makes an attempt to reproduce the perceived sounds. An accurate pronunciation does not come immediately. But a child with normal hearing, listening to one’s own speech, compares it with the pronunciation of others, making new attempts to correctly pronounce the word, and finally, using the auditory control achieves the movements of the speech apparatus, which are required for the implementation of one or another of the speech sound. It turns out impossible with defective hearing (Martindale, 2007; Williams, 2004).
Disabled hearing perception makes it impossible to accumulate a sufficient vocabulary and master grammatical system of language. A child deprived of a full auditory control cannot learn by its own the movements of articulatory apparatus that are necessary for the correct pronunciation of sounds. Without normal hearing, without an adequate perception of one’s own speech, a child is deprived of the opportunity to compare its speech with speech of others, and therefore cannot independently fix its defective pronunciation (Williams, 2004).
The correlation between the degree of hearing disorder and the level of skill towards learning
Hearing impairment in children varies in the extent and nature of the disorder. With different degrees and different quality of the preserved hearing a child is able to distinguish between certain speech sounds at a certain distance from the earflap, that is, at a certain degree of sound amplification (the closer to the earflap, the louder the sounds). If a child perceives familiar or commonly used words at least near the earflap without amplification, he/she distinguishes all the vowels, some consonants, and sometimes the common features of consonants, aphonic sounds from voiced ones, differentiates nasal sounds, distinguishes moderated sounds from the solid (Williams, 2004; Teale, 1987).
Children who hear the speech at a distance of 0.5 m from the ear have a dramatically disrupted pronunciation and slurred articulation. The grammatical structure of their speech is also dramatically violated. Further study showed that it is difficult for such children to understand not only speech, but the read text (Schirmer, 2000).
Much better is the case with children who hear the speech of normal conversational volume at a distance of 1-2 m from the ear. They learn the first words much earlier and to by the age of five already have a vocabulary that allows them to express their wishes, requests, pleasure or displeasure, address their coevals while playing, etc. The speech of such children, however, also has serious defects. They pronounce words with large distortions, make up short phrases only, badly understand the speech addressed to them due to the poor vocabulary. Their phrases are usually constructed incorrectly missing the beginning or the end of words, and lacking grammatical agreement (Schirmer, 2000).
Children who hear the speech of normal volume at a distance of 3 m from the ear, have a significant set of everyday words and phrases, but mispronounce them. Children with a much better hearing can hear the speech of normal conversational volume at a distance of 6-8 m, but they hear whispered speech only at close distance or do not hear it at all. If such a small decrease in hearing occurs at an early age, certain defections can be observed in the speech development of children that prevent them from successful studying at school. Inaccurate perception of the sound structure of words is very typical of such children, and can often be observed even with small hearing disorder (Schirmer, 2000).
There are only a small number of children fully deprived of hearing. As a rule, all totally deaf children are able to perceive very loud sounds of nature, like thunder, loud noises (train whistle, bell sound), vibrations of musical instruments, etc. There are reasons to reckon that this reaction occurs due to the so-called vibration sensitivity – through the hard parts of our body (skeleton, tense muscles). However, the ability of perception of non-speech sounds is insufficient for a clear perception of phonemes (speech sounds) and therefore such a residual hearing can in no way serve a child as a means for independent learning of speech sounds (Schirmer, 2000; Teale, 1987).
Hearing disorder cannot provide a child with perception of words which is necessary for learning language through imitation (as occurs during normal development of speech). In some cases, deaf children learn to recognize some words by the shape of the lips. For example, they can answer the question “What is your name?”, repeat the words “Mom” and “Dad”; and these are the limits of their auditory perception (Williams, 2004).
The situation changes with a slightly higher degree of residual hearing. If the child is capable through hearing to repeat, though distortedly, the words spoken by the voice of normal conversational volume even if at the very ear, then he/she can independently accumulate some vocabulary, even though distorted.
Studies of perception differences of normal and deaf children
In an attempt to evaluate clear differences in the learning skills of normal and deaf children, a study was conducted involving deaf pupils of the first grade at the age of 6-9 years (53) and normally hearing students at the age of 6-9 years (25 people). Deaf children were divided into two groups: 1) those, who do not have additional impairments – 27 children; and 2) those having a variety of additional development problems (visual impairment, developmental delay, indications of neurological and psychiatric pathologies) – 26 children.
The participants were examined through using Raven’s Colored Progressive Matrices (widely used as the non-verbal intelligence test) and research methodologies of probabilistic prediction. The technique was created in comparison with neuro-physiological data, so we assumed that it will catch the features of deaf children with additional neuro-violations. The technique includes 3 sets of cards with the letters A and B, alternating in sequence (1 – ABAB, 2 – BBAA, 3 – ABB), which should be determined by the participant.
The analysis included forecasting errors (% of total responses before determining the sequence, i.e., its proper triple repetition); distraction errors (% of total number of responses, because in this way it is more convenient to look at the ratio of the two types of errors) and the number of sequences reproduced from memory.
The analysis of the results of the Raven’s test, obtained by dispersion analysis, showed that the factor of additional disorders significantly affects the results of deaf children. Deaf children with complex disabilities performed the tests significantly worse than normally developing deaf children and normally hearing students, while the difference between the latter was insignificant. For all the groups, the number of forecasting errors is significantly greater than the number of the errors of distraction. At the same time, the number of distraction errors among the deaf children without additional disorders is significantly higher than among children hearing normally.
Thus, the results of the study generally show that deaf children of primary school age, on average, lag behind their hearing peers in terms of non-verbal indicators.
The following is a brief list of speech defects that can be detected in children with hearing impairment (Martindale, 2007; Williams, 2004; Sulzby & Teale, 2003):
mispronunciation;
limited vocabulary;
poor mastering of the sound structure of words expressed in the inaccuracies of pronunciation and in the wrong spelling of words;
inaccurate understanding and misuse of words;
defects in grammatical structure of speech;
incorrect construction of sentences;
incorrect concord within the sentence;
limited understanding of spoken speech;
limited understanding of readable text.
As a result of these defects in the speech development, hearing-impaired children face the following difficulties in schooling (Dorit, 2008; Giorgis & Glazer, 2008):
difficulty in mastering the primary literacy (reading and writing);
specific mistakes in dictation and independent writing;
difficulty in understanding the teacher’s explanations;
difficulties in using textbooks due to insufficient understanding of readable text.
Peculiarities of the literacy obtainment process
As it has been mentioned above, the degree of speech deficiency is primarily correlated with the degree of hearing defect. The heavier the hearing defect is, the less developed the speech is with other conditions equal. Not only the degree of impairment, but also the period of emergence of hearing defect determines the level of speech development. The later a hearing defect occurs, the higher the probability is of preserving the achieved speech development. A child who loses hearing before the age of 3-3.5 usually does not save the speech he obtained when the hearing was normal. If a child loses hearing at the age of 4-5, his/her speech begins to disintegrate, he/she forgets some words, loses the ability to use grammatical forms, and forgets the sound of even those words that were often used in communication. Even a child who has lost hearing at the age of 6 or 7 often comes to school age with a sharply distorted speech (Harrington, 2010; Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998).
The level of speech development in children with hearing impairment depends on the combination of the following four conditions (Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998):
degree of hearing disorder;
period of hearing defect occurrence;
pedagogical conditions of the development of such child;
individual peculiarities.
The study of the level of intellectual abilities formation of deaf children has enabled to establish the following. Insufficient cognitive activity, inability to organize activities, low development level of intellectual operations of visual thinking tend to create significant difficulties in language development and early stages of conceptual thinking, which generally leads to inability to digest the program of special kindergarten and unpreparedness of children to school. With middle and high development of the above components of intellectual abilities in deaf children the progress in the development of speech and conceptual thinking depends on the quality of preschool education received by each child in a specific institution and the family, although this does not diminish the value of the internal conditions of development (anatomical and physiological assumptions, psycho-physiological structures emerging on their basis in the ontogeny, level of development of abilities reached by the current stage) (Luckner & Muir, 2002).
The necessary component for the formation of any socially significant ability is the development of active independent speech of deaf children that becomes a means of regulation of mental activity. An important component of abilities is sufficiently developed visual thinking within which all the mental operations formulate and speech becomes the means of mental activity. However, with respect to speech, visual thinking is only one of the conditions conducive to its development (Harrington, 2010).
To form the abilities of construction meaningful are the components like the ability to visualize and analyze the constructed object, to anticipate in the images the intermediate and final results, the ability to change the approach to the solution during the process, to rethink the role and place of each piece in the construction, the ability to use one’s own life and academic experience in an unusual situation that requires creative solutions (Luckner & Muir, 2002; Martindale, 2007).
The level of formation of constructive ability in deaf children (from preschool to senior school age) significantly depends on the capabilities of their visual-imaginative thinking and regulation of their own activities at all stages of solving tasks. For the development of constructive abilities of deaf children in learning conditions it is necessary to enrich their experience of solving illustrative and practical tasks during which children learn to operate images of the whole and its parts in their relations with each other, to rethink these relationships, to find their most successful combinations. The identified significant individual differences in the construction activities in deaf school children indicate the need for reasonable individual approach in forming their constructive abilities taking into account the current abilities of each pupil (Williams, 2004; Luckner & Muir, 2002).
The development of literacy abilities of deaf children is based on the formation of the ability to see an object holistically, understand the relation of parts as a whole, as well as the place of each object in a complex composition. It is also important that children should develop their recreate and creative imagination which allows them to mentally imagine the object in its absence, recombine existing images, and create new ones. Specificities in the development of perception, visual thinking and imagination of deaf children which develop due to their hearing defect, makes techniques and methods of learning objects especially meaningful. It is equally important to teach children the techniques and methods of depicting the object, with the particular importance of the development of children’s ability to plan their activities, allocate its successive stages, and implement speech regulation (Giorgis & Glazer, 2008). Taking into account significant individual differences in the levels of learning abilities in deaf and normal children of the same age as well as among deaf children, specially organized training centers can provide significant progress in developing their abilities.
Conclusion
Maldevelopment of hearing deprives a child of the most important sources of information, which leads to a delay in mental and speech development, especially if a child has lost hearing in early childhood. The degree of severity of mental retardation depends on the cause, severity and time of hearing disorder development. The earlier and the heavier the disorder is, the more the delay is expressed in mental and speech development of a child. Maldevelopment of all the components of speech (pronunciation, vocabulary, grammatical structure, connected speech) inhibits the formation of abstract-logical thinking of a child.
Studying the initial formation of speech abilities in deaf children in comparison with normal one has allowed us to differentiate such important components of this process as the need for communication and the desire to communicate with spoken language, the relative ease in learning vocabulary and grammatical construction of sentences, the emerging inclination to accurate, complete, and meaningful utterances. The research has described the significant individual differences in the development of speech skills in deaf children of primary school age. It is shown that modern methods of special education of deaf children speech are mostly productive, if constant communication through spoken language is provided, and the ability to build grammatically correct utterances is formed in writing and is automated in oral speech.
The results of this study have not only scientific but also practical importance in education of deaf children. They once again confirm the need for adequate application of diagnostic tools, as well as taking into account the individual features of each child and paying attention to child’s health and progress of development.
