Mothers talking with their hearing or deaf children aged one to five years were compared on measures of maternal control over conversations and child response to different levels of such control. Groups were matched separately on age and expressive language ability. Maternal input depended upon children's linguistic receptive capacity rather than age or cognitive level, confirming a multi-factor theory of control of maternal input to language learners. Negative correlations were found between maternal repair of deviant child utterances and child initiative and length of turn and positive ones between these maternal behaviours and child misunderstanding. Correlations between maternal control and child measures were positive when children were beginning to speak, but negative once children were able to contribute more to the exchange. A number of language acquisition research projects in recent years has compared the interaction of hearing and deaf children with their mothers, both to clarify the role of environmental factors in normal communication development and to provide information about the course of such development in deaf children.

The relationship between recent advances in Psychology and developments in the field of Deaf Education are discussed. It is maintained that the long standing controversy concerning the appropriate methodology for communicating with profoundly deaf children has now been resolved. Cognitive studies done by Furth and his associates (1973) and Conrad (1970); studies of Sign Language and Sign Language acquisition (Bellugi & Klima, 1972; Circourel & Boese, 1973; and Stokoe, 1965); Primate Communication studies (Gardner & Gardner, 1969; Premack & Premack, 1974), and studies of educational methodologies (Vernon & Koh, 1970; Moores, Weiss & Goodwin, 1975) have all directly and indirectly pointed to the legitimacy of Sign Language as a major component in the communication system to be used with deaf children. The postive interaction between Experimental Psychology and this rather unique field of Special Education can be expected to grow and develop in the future.

Some problems in the field of Deaf Education are described. It is maintained that the dominant system of educating the deaf in North America, usually referred to as the oralist approach, has been a failure. Reasons for the failure of pure oralism are offered, and some suggestions are made for an approach to Deaf Education which would involve the introduction of the language signs and fingerspelling at the time critical for language development.Also, the relationship of the adult deaf community to the educational system is discussed, and suggestions are made concerning the potential of Instructional Television for adult deaf education as well as for the education of deaf children.

An experiment was conducted to determine the role of auditory and kinesthetic cues produced by overt verbalizations in a learning situation. Two groups of deaf and one group of hearing children were required to learn three paired•associate lists consisting of pictures, words, and nonsense syllables. One deaf group and the hearing group used speech in the verbalization condition, while the remaining deaf group used signing and fingerspeJling as a method of verbalization. The results indicated that overt verbalizations did not lead to an improvement in performance for any of the groups in any of the conditions. The relative importance of auditory and kinesthetic imagery in the process of recall and recognition was discussed, and suggestions were made concerning the relevance of these findings for linguistic development in deaf children. A number of experiments have indicated that the deaf do not perform as well as the hearing in various visual memory and learning situations

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