engleski

Early communication in Deaf child family - New tradition

One of the first concerns of parents with hearing impaired children is connected with the question of choosing the communication modality: spoken language, sign language, or combining two modalities – simultaneous communication. Every parent expresses the wish his child to be “normal“ – in all developmental characteristics fit into the picture of typical child development. So, that is the reason that parents choose mostly spoken language in communication and hearing and speech (re)habilitation. In Croatia at the beginning of 21st century – based on longtime foreign experience – the idea about the positive role of early communication on national sign language encourage some parents in their decision choosing Croatian sign language (HZJ) as a first language of their deaf child. It was not meant rejecting hearing and speech rehabilitation because bilingual bicultural approach includes auditory-verbal therapy. Selection of simultaneous, sign-oral communication – in the same time syntactic structures of spoken language are presented with sign language lexical items, mostly nouns, verbs, adjectives, numbers and pronouns, can be one of the choices. Scientific research proved that this mode of communication is not leading to the language acquisition because simultaneous input of the two languages distorts both, and the child is disabled in receiving language in a natural way. On the other hand, longitudinal studies show the benefits of early sign language acquisition in deaf children: the basic of the language is fully developed by the third year, cognitive development and knowledge about the world is age appropriate, the problem of limited communication is eliminated, children fluent in sign language (L1) represent the language minority who learns spoken or written language as a second language (L2). Early sign language acquisition does not interfere with spoken language learning, on contrary it encourages it.

deaf and hard of hearing children, communication in the family, spoken language, sign language, simultaneous communication

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