Metaphor and Conservation in Hearing-Impaired Children: Cued Speech, Manually-Coded English and Oral-Aural Comparisons

Abstract

Tweny-three severely hearing-impaired adolescents and five normal-hearing students participated in this study. The hearing-impaired subjects ranged in chronological age from 11 years, 9 months to 18 years, 3 months (mean = 15 years, 3 months). All subjects had a pre-lingual unaided hearing loss of 70 to 100 dB in the speech range (mean = 89 dB). The hearing-impaired subjects were grouped according to the communication mode used at school in instructional situations (i.e., cued speech, manually-coded English, or oral-aural). The subjects were presented with 4 modified, Piagetian conservation problems and 10 linguistically-sensitive metaphor stories. While the cued speech group performed higher than any other group on the conservation problems and the oral-aural group performed better on the metaphoric problems than the other two hearing-impaired groups, the performance differences among and between them were not statistically significant.