Oral language and sign language: possible approaches for deaf people’s language development

Resumo

Deafness is a sensory impairment which strongly affects the normal acquisition and development of linguistic abilities. Deaf people are severely hindered in the development of oral speech because they do not have direct access to the linguistic input and many of them do not acquire much more than the rudiments of oral communication. While hearing children acquire easily and naturally a spoken language, deaf children might acquire in the same way a sign language, exploiting the visual modality. This study investigated the general linguistic competence in Italian of four different groups of deaf individuals (orally-trained children with cochlear implants, native signers, non-native signers and deaf foreigners adolescents and adults), by using a standardized picture matching task, in order to determine the level of their linguistic competence. Results revealed that most deaf individuals showed a performance comparable to that of very young hearing children. Cochlear implanted children performed significantly better than all the other groups, and the less accurate performance was that of foreigner deaf students, who often have not any kind of underlying language. Despite the better performance of cochlear implanted children, who generally do not use the sign language, the best solution to approach the oral language would appear to be the combination of oral training and sign language, in order to be able to communicate with both the deaf and the hearing communities. The school system in this sense should find some strategies in order to help deaf foreigners to get access to the grammar of the oral language.