Georgia State University Series

The Impact of a Hearing Loss on Development

Affected Areas

Language Learning

Education

Social-Emotional Development

Cognition

Communication

Language Learning

Comprehension and production are separate issues

The communication needs of the child provide the semantic and pragmatic base for instruction in grammar.

Normal language development forms the scope and sequence of instruction in the grammatical aspects of language.

Language Learning (Continued)

Teachers need to help students generalize language skills to novel situations. To impart language in its richness and usefulness, there must be two-way communication. The child must experience the meaning of language in many ways.

Input must be comprehensible.

Comparing Receptive and Expressive Language of Children Both With and Without Hearing

Loss.

Children whose hearing loss was identified by 6 months of

age had significantly better scores than those identified after 6 months of age.

In those with normal cognitive abilities, this statistical difference was independent of age, gender, ethnicity, communication mode, degree of hearing loss,

socioeconomic group, or the presence or absence of other disabilities.

Univ. of Colorado Study by Yoshinaga-Itano

Education

THE DEAF CHILD’S FIRST CLASSROOM IS THE HOME

What Deaf Children Learn:

AttentionResponsivenessConsistencyPredictabilityAttachment

 Infant Development in All Areas:

1 month- Social/Emotional Development2 months- Motor Development5 months- Cognitive Development10-12 mo.- Play Development10-12 mo.- Pre-literacy Development

“Language and intelligence are seen as intimately intertwined, such that language development drives intellectual development as much intellectual development drives language development”.

Akamatsu, C. Tane and Musselman, Carol. (1990).

Long Term Effect of Education on Hearing Loss

 With Early Intervention

     at age 2 child has age- appropriate levels in language, motor, and cognitive skills…

Without Early Intervention

Most deaf children begin school with a limited language and knowledge base.Age 2 is year of “Language Explosion”-same time typical deaf child is identified

 

Social-emotional Development

Deaf children could be considered to be impulsive, egocentric, or socially immature. This is due to experiencing limited communication in their family environment

Deafness in itselfdoes not lead topoor socialcompetence; poor and limited communicationresults in poor social competence.

For deaf children or others who have experienced delays in language, the inability to spontaneously mediate experience and label aspects of emotional states leads to increasingly serious gaps in social-emotional development.

As a group, deaf children show significant deficits when compared with hearing children in such areas as impulse control, self-esteem, the ability to interpret facial expressions, and moral development.

Imagine how difficult it would be to have a strong, positive self-concept if:

(1) one often did not understand what was happening and why,

(2) one had a limited vocabulary to express internal feelings, and

(3) one always felt dependent upon others to solve one’s own problems!

Cognition

Research suggests that deaf children are more likely to have greater difficulties when language is required but not necessarily when tasks are nonverbal.

In general, deaf children show delays in the development of emotional understanding.

Communication

For communication to be effective, it must be directed specifically to deaf children, who must pay close visual attention. Deafness itself limits some avenues of incidental learning.