A comparative analysis of the expressive acquisition of locative and directional prepositions between severely-to-profoundly hearing impaired children utilizing total communication and the oral/aural approach Cathleen Pew Edwards Portland State UniversityLet us know how access to this document benefits you. The total communication (TC) subjects were from programs incorporating signed exact English. The subjects were between the ages of 4 years, 0 months and 12 years, 6 months and were selected for this study on the basis of chr6nolog-ical age, congenital or prelingual deafness prior to age 2 and lack of multiple handicapping conditions. The 17 prepositions were tested in the same manner as specified by Warlick ( 1983), except the mode of communication used and elicited was TC instead of oral/aural (QA). The test utilized objects which were placed in a designated position (e.g., "behind the garage'').Responses were scored as correct only if the target preposition was produced.3 There were no statistically significant differences between the TC and OA subjects in the expressive acquisition of prepositions. Performance of both groups on the test improved with age, indicating a developmental trend. The mean scores for the locative and directional prepositions also increased with age. In the TC group, younger subjects produced more directional than locative prepositions; this was reversed, however, for the oldest TC subjects. In contrast, the OA subjects produced more directional than locative prepositions at all age levels. Although the means for directional prepositions between the TC and OA groups were similar, the standard deviations were higher in the TC group, which indicates that there was more variance among the TC group when correctly expressing directional prepositions.