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Open Access Thesis

Keywords

Deaf children--Language; Deaf--Means of communication;

Abstract

The present study was designed to compare the understanding of the fifty items on the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts (Boehm, 1971) in three groups of eight children ranging in age from 5-3 to 11-6 years. One group consisted of deaf children who were primarily educated in the aural/oral method (AOM). This approach is said to utilize residual hearing, amplification, speech, and speechreading while signing is discouraged or forbidden. The second group consisted of deaf children who were taught in a simultaneous method approach (SM). Natural gestures, fingerspelling, facial expression, body language, and a signed language system in conjunction with speech, speechreading, and utilization of residual hearing are all components of this approach. The third group constituted a control group of normal-hearing children (NH). The two groups of deaf children (AOM and SM) obtained significantly lower mean scores on the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts than the group of normal-hearing children (NH). Although the SM group obtained a higher mean score than the AOM group, this difference was not significant when all eight subjects in each group were compared. An analysis of raw scores for six subjects each in the two experimental groups, when the highest and lowest scores were excluded, indicated a significantly better performance by the SM group than the AOM group. It is possible that with a larger, more homogeneous sample this trend in favor of the simultaneous approach may have been strengthened. Concept profiles, as represented by mean scores for the four concept categories (Space, Time, Quantity and Miscellaneous) on 2 the Boehm Test, of the normal-hearing subjects differed significantly from those profiles obtained by the two experimental groups. In addition, a comparison of the response rankings of the hearing impaired children to normative data provided by Boehm revealed that the responses of the deaf children were essentially reversed in difficulty from the responses recorded for normal-hearing children. It may be inferred that the acquisition of certain concepts occurs in an irregular manner in deaf children, perhaps due to the artificial selection and manner in which these concepts are introduced and stressed. No significant differences were found between concept profiles obtained by the two experimental groups.

Year of Submission

1978

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology

First Advisor

Hugo L. Beykirch

Second Advisor

Roy E. Eblen

Third Advisor

Elliot Lessen

Comments

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Date Original

1978

Object Description

1 PDF file (61 leaves)

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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