Reception of Mothers' Referential Messages by Deaf and Hearing Children

Hearing children 4, 6, and 8 years of age and deaf children 6 to 10 years of age who communicated orally (speech only) or bimodally (speech plus sign) participated in two receptive communication tasks. In Task 1, their mothers described, orally or bimodally, a designated picture from a set of four pictures so that the child could identify the intended referent from the four alternatives. In Task 2, the child was not given the stimulus set until the mother had completed her description. The presence or absence of the referential array had no differential effect on hearing or deaf children's ability to select the intended referent. Age-related improvements were apparent in the performance of hearing children, with 6- and 8-year-olds making more correct selections than did 4-year-olds. Deaf children performed more poorly than did hearing children but the performance of orally and bimodally communicating children did not differ. In a subsequent experiment, two adults with appropriate communicative competence acted as "receivers" for each mother's videotaped messages. The receptive performance of these adults revealed that the messages of bimodally communicating mothers were less adequate than those of orally communicating mothers. When the inadequate messages of mothers were excluded, the receptive performance of deaf children who communicated bimodally was found to be better than that of deaf children who communicated orally.