THE REFERENTIAL COMMUNICATION SKILLS OF DEAF CHILDREN FROM DIFFERENT EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENTS

SUMMARY Two studies of the communication skills of orally educated deaf primary school children are repotted. In the first, a referential communication task with very limited linguistic demands, severely and profoundly deaf children performed as well us a hearing control group. In the second task with a richer linguistic domain. differences m performance were found between deaf children from three schools with different linguistic philosophies, children from the school performing com‐parably to hearing children, those from the other two schools slightly worse. It is concluded that deaf children are more able communicators than their grammatical competence suggests.