LANGUAGE AND COGNITIVE FLEXIBILITY IN DEAF CHILDREN

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The cognitive and language flexibility of deaf children will be examined through the investigation of their abilities to produce and comprehend figurative language constructions. In hearing children, these skills have been shown to require meta-linguistic knowledge, the ability to see abstract relationships among diverse elements, and non-literal mapping of one conceptual domain onto another: all skills that deaf children are reported to lack. Assessment of these skills in deaf children, however, are rather biased insofar as they usually require some competence in English (usually their second language). Deaf children thus may have linguistic and cognitive capabilities comparable to those of their hearing peers, but qualitatively different (and often untapped) by virture of their reliance on a visuo-spatial rather than an acoustic-verbal mode of communication. This research therefore will investigate the extent of these abilities within sign language and compare them to the similar abilities of hearing children tested in English. In several production studies, children will create stories to novel themes. These will be analyzed for the quantity and type of non-literal, creative constructions. Comprehension studies will examine the deaf child's ability to interpret or select interpretations of English-like and/or signed figurative constructions. Among the major variables of interest will be age, hearing status, English fluency, and parental hearing status. This project is intended to clarify the relationship between language and cognitive development by evaluating related abilities of the deaf child in "culture-fair" testing. Results thus will provide information of both theoretical and applied value in several areas.