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Controverse about the effects which the Sign Language of deaf has on their communicative and educational achievement is the subject of actual research. For the first time the effects of Serbian Sign Language are investigated. The sample was made of 60 subjects. The subjects were children with severe hearing impairments - more than 80 dB - aged 8 to 12 years and divided into a control and an experimental group. Before the beginning, the experimental and the control group were made equal in terms of the degree of hearing loss, communication abilities, IQ, age, sex and school achievement, and after the experiment their communicative ability was retested by means of the Communication Competence Scale and their school achievement was compared. The research scheme applied in the study is an experiment with parallel groups. The experimental group participated in a communication workshop on a daily basis for five months and learned Serbian sign language through various tasks and games. No activities were carried out with the control group. The data were statistically interpreted by means of the repeated measures two-factor analysis of variance. The results confirm that learning and improving Serbian Sign Language has positive effects on the promotion of verbal competence (receptive and expressive), global communicative competence and school achievement. The study has also confirmed that the Communication Competence Scale is valid, reliable and discriminative

Empirical findings on the difficulties deaf children face in certain areas of cognitive, conative, emotional and social development served as a basis for The Integral Development Method for Deaf Children. The principles of the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD) relating to the importance of sign language, neglected for a long time, provided a wider basis of this method. The first part of the article presents the method in a general way. The research part of the article examined the results of two experimentally controlled workshops. The first workshop examined the effects of various non-verbal stimulation techniques on cognitive development. The second workshop examined the effects of a systematic application of sign language on communicative and educative development. Data in Study 1 were collected by Piagets test and in Study 2 we collected by the Communication Competence Scale. The sample consisted of 50 subjects in Study 1 and 60 subjects in Study 2. The subjects were deaf children aged 8 to 12 years. The results confirmed that systematic application of various non-verbal workshop techniques that are suitable for deaf children significantly contributes to the promotion of cognitive development and that they effectively enhance and accelerate the concrete operational stage. A systematic application of Serbian sign language influenced promotion of Serbian speech language and complete communicative competence as well as higher cohesion of sign language end speech language communication skills. Sign language also influenced school achievement. Key words: cognitive development; communication; non-verbal approaches; sign language