The Impact of Sign Language on the Cognitive Development of Deaf Children: The Case of Theories of Mind

Abstract

The ability to attribute false beliefs (i.e., demonstrate theory of mind) by 155 deaf children between 5 and 8 years of age was compared to that of 39 hearing children ages 4 to 6. The hypotheses under investigation were (1) that linguistic features of sign language could promote the development of theories of mind and (2) that early exposure to language would allow an easier access to these theories. Deaf children were grouped according to their communication mode and the hearing status of their parents. The results obtained in three false belief tasks supported the hypotheses: effective representational abilities were demonstrated by deaf children of deaf parents, whereas those born to hearing parents appeared delayed in that regard, with differences according to their communication mode.

Evaluación Neuropsicológica en niños sordos: Resultados preliminares obtenidos con la batería AWARD Neuropsychological

“…Con respecto a la utilización de IC, sólo encontramos diferencias significativas en la tarea de Alternancias Motoras (F(1,25) = 4.7; p < 0.04), obteniendo una puntuación significativamente más alta los niños con IC. Campbell, MacSweeney y Waters, 2007;Courtin, 2000;Emmorey et al, 2002). Sin embargo, es preciso señalar que la gran mayoría de los niños signantes que participaron en el presente estudio, no eran hijos de padres sordos, por lo que no adquieren la LSE de forma natural y la mayoría de ellos tampoco fueron introducidos de forma temprana a este modo de comunicación.…”

Decoding Actions and Emotions in Deaf Children: Evidence From a Biological Motion Task

“…The first of these showed that there was no effect of severity of hearing loss on error rate, (F (1,23) = .10, p = .75). As research has shown that deaf children with signing family members perform as well as age and intelligence matched hearing children on emotion recognition and theory of mind tasks (Courtin, 2000;Peterson & Siegal, 1999); we compared the total numbers of correct scores, obtained by the twelve deaf children who had signing family members (aged 6 years 9 months-15 years 8 months: mean = 10 years 3 months, SD = 3.4) with those obtained by the twelve children without signing family members (aged 6 years 8 months-16 years 10 months: mean = 12 years 4 months, SD = 2.4). This included 7 families where only the mother signed and 4 where both parents signed.…”

Improving the Cognitive Skills of Hearing Children by Short-Term Intensive Sign Language Training

“…There is general consensus that though their grammatical structures are different from those of spoken language, they can be analyzed using the frameworks of phonological, morphological and syntax techniques derived from spoken language studies (Baker & Cokely, 1980;Stokoe, 1980). With recent advances in sign linguistics, many studies have been conducted in developmental psychology and cognitive psychology on the process of sign language acquisition in deaf children (e.g., Newport, E. L. 1990;Courtin, 2000;Senghas, Kita, & Ozyurek, 2004).…”