Children's understanding of referential messages produced by deaf and hearing speakers

Abstract

Children 4 to 10 years of age were presented with referential messages that varied in message adequacy and speech quality and were required to choose the intended referent from a set of four alternatives. Following feedback regarding their choice, they evaluated the message as good or bad and provided reasons for their evaluation. Half of the messages had sufficient information to define the referent uniquely; half had insufficient or ambiguous information. Moreover, half of the messages were produced by hearing children and half by deaf children. Children's comprehension and evaluation of messages changed systematically with age, as did the basis for these evaluations. The 4-and 5-year-olds performed poorly on the picture selection task but evaluated most messages as good; 6-year-olds rated messages as good if they had chosen the correct referent, even by guessing. From 8 years of age, children judged the adequacy of messages independent of outcome and linked their justifications to relevant details of the messages. Messages that were fully intelligible to adults but had atypical speech quality resulted in poorer performance and evaluations than did messages with normal speech quality for children of all ages.Effective verbal communication is a complex social-cognitive enterprise,

French children's ability to introduce referents in narratives as a function of mutual knowledge

“…For example, they differ in terms of the following variables, all of which are essential for the introduction of referents: whether the narrator is familiar with the contents of the narrative, whether the addressee (adult or child) is physically present, and especially whether s/he shares knowledge about the referents. As has been shown by studies devoted to referential communication, variables related to the interlocutors' competence, including academic status, deafness, co-operativeness, affect speakers' performance (e.g., Anderson, Yule & Brown 1984, Bonitatibus, Godshall, Kelley, Levering & Lynch 1988, Brownell, Trehub & Gartner 1988). In addition, even in comparable communicative situations, children are asked to perform very different tasks, e.g., naming referents, describing unrelated pictures, narrating picture sequences, narrating films during versus after presentation, etc.…”

Sensitivity to conversational maxims in deaf and hearing children

“…In comparison to hearing controls, deaf children show more difficulties in asking and replying to questions (Nicholas & Geers, 2003), such as questions designed to clarify referential communication tasks (Jeanes, Nienhuys & Richards, 2000) and to express proto-declarative intentions (Lichtert & Loncke, 2006). Deaf children attending primary and secondary schools often produce underinformative utterances that are not effective in communication (Silvestre, Ramspott & Pareto, 2007 ; see also Brownell, Trehub & Gartner, 1988) and they use non-literal constructions in their written compositions less often than do hearing controls (Everhart & Marschark, 1988).…”

Word awareness in hearing-impaired children

“…One population that is at risk for language and communication delays on the basis of reduced or degraded auditory input is the hearing impaired (for reviews, see King & Quigley, 1985;Quigley & Paul, 1984). Aside from speech intelligibility problems (Brownell, Trehub, & Gartner, 1988;Mc-Garr, 1983;Monsen, 1983), the referential messages (in spoken or signed English) of 6-to 10-year-old hearing-impaired children are less precise than those of their normally hearing peers (MacKay-Soroka, Trehub, & Thorpe, 1987), and their reception of referential messages (in spoken English or Signed English) is likewise delayed (MacKay-Soroka, Trehub, & Thorpe, 1988). These language and communication problems are compounded by deficiencies in syntactic achievement (Quigley, Wilbur, Power, Montanelli, & Steinkamp, 1976) and reading ability (Trybus & Karchmer, 1977).…”