The Contribution of Verbal Working Memory to Deaf Children’s Oral and Written Production
Barbara Arfé, Cristina Rossi, and Silvia Sicoli In the past, many studies have been made for the oral and written capabilities of deaf children. But this journal focuses on the same factors but with their working memory. The children who participated in this study were severely or profoundly deaf and aged from eight to thirteen years old. In specific, they focused on the verbal working memory because this affects their language performances. Previous studies focused on their oral language and written capabilities with exercises such as sentence comprehension or spelling. But here they decided to examine their memory by inspecting the deaf children’s …show more content…
During a child’s early life, it is dependent on the parent’s linguistic decisions, exposure, and interactions that would determine whether a child could actively use two languages. When it comes to bilingual development an assumption is made that the child will use the language that is exposed to them the most. But this includes factors that are outside of the parent’s reach, such as the language used at school or in the community. This contributes to the child’s attitudes and usage toward these languages which creates an unequal status where one language becomes the majority and the other the minority. Because of this, the status of the minority language can affect its usage. In order to do determine this, the children 's productive vocabulary was measured (MLU) in spoken and signed Finnish. In the procedure, the families of ten children were observed, by Kanto, every six months beginning from when the child was 12 months old and lasted until they were three years old. The children, Lauri, Kati, Onni, Paula, and Matti had both deaf parents. While the other five, Miisa, Miina, Heido, Ari, and Riina had one deaf and one hearing parent. They collected data from twelve to thirty months and did so by collecting information from parent interviews, questionnaires, and monitored interaction sessions with the parent and the child. The study showed that the …show more content…
Their goal was to determine if there was a correlation between the vocabulary scores of deaf children in Sign Language (of the Netherlands) and in written Dutch. In order to do so, they evaluated eighty-seven deaf children from bilingual education programs. Out of the total, fifty of the children were boys and thirty-seven were girls. They came from five schools whose grades ranged from pre kindergarten to early elementary school for deaf children in the Netherlands. All these children had hearing loss measured at more than 80 dB and nonverbal intelligence. They were given sign and reading vocabulary tasks and story comprehension in both languages. By doing so they examined how other factors, such as having hearing parents or a language preference, affected their performance on these tasks. Their reading skills were measured with two tests where they had to read vocabulary and write a story. Vocabulary was assessed by having the child look at a written word on a screen and match it with the correct picture. For story comprehension, they had to read six stories which gradually increased in complexity. Afterwards, they were asked four questions about the story and had the option to respond in however way they prefered. Most of the children chose to respond in sign language. In the data collected they found that these children had stronger language skills in