The Development of Referential Communication in Deaf and Hearing Children: Competence and Style

Abstract

The paper examines the development of communicative competence in deaf children and its interactions with the use of gestures and/or words to comunicate. Deaf children, in addition to the cognitive problem involved in communication, must also choose a particular channel to produce the verbal and/or gestural message. In the first experiment the experimenter designated one out of four drawings to the "transmitter", who had to produce a message for the "receiver" to enable him to identify the drawing. The data show that (1) the use of gestures to communicate increases with age while the speech used remains constant, and (2) the amount of gestures used is correlated with communicative accuracy. A possible explanation of these data is that the increased use of gestures has a cognitive base: i.e., that it comes from a better understanding of the communication situation. Experiment 2 is aimed to test this hypothesis. The main results show that individual differences in communicative competence are correlated with the use of gestures but not with the use of speech, and that children increased the number of gestures, but not the number of words, when communication difficulty increased.