Picture-Sound Association in Deaf Children

Abstract

Programmed instruction in picture-sound association was given to 26 deaf children aged 4 to 10, 20 hearing children with learning disorders aged 7 to 15, and 18 normal children aged 4 to 6 from day nurseries. The learning task involved tape-recorded presentation of a meaningful nonverbal sound in conjunction with three pictures projected on the response windows of a viewing-response device. The subject was required to match the picture with the sound. The majority of deaf children (19 of 26) learned the task in from 1 to 11 sessions. All but two of the children with learning disorders learned on the first session, and 13 of the 18 younger normal children learned in from 1 to 6 sessions. The performance of the deaf children bore some relation to age, hearing loss, and aided hearing ability but not to teacher rating of intelligence. The results indicated that even profoundly deaf children might benefit from auditory nonverbal perceptual training.