Objective : Children who has hearing impairment, whether congenital or postnatal, are less or not able to hear oral words. This delays those children's language development and has much adverse effects on their cognitive development, resultantly makin...
Objective : Children who has hearing impairment, whether congenital or postnatal, are less or not able to hear oral words. This delays those children's language development and has much adverse effects on their cognitive development, resultantly making the children have great difficulties in follow-up learning and social adaptation. Thus the most important thing is to find hearing impairment as earliest as possible. Then an appropriate intervention should be provided to prevent the disorder from adversely affecting child development.
The purpose of this study is to confirm the importance of an early Edu-Care setting for hearing-impaired children whose parents have the same disorder and who are using of likely to use double language(oral language, sign language). For the purpose, this researcher investigated those children's oral language learning, developments in the use of oral or sign language and developments in the use of both oral plus sign languages, sign language only or oral language only at their home.
Material and Method : The subject of this study was a 36-month-year old, hearing-impaired girl(born on March 2, 2003) who was little exposed to auditory stimuli because her parents also had the same disorder.
The longitudinal research was made for 13 months from Sep, 1, 2006 to Oct. 1, 2007. During the period, the girl participated in 8 sessions of her preferred activity together with a peer under an environment like in her child care center. The peer with no hearing disorder was supposed to lead the activity. And another 6 sessions of the same activity were provided to the subject under an environment like in her home. During the sessions, how and with what means the girl was communicating was videotaped. The researcher and a speech therapist viewed the videotaped material to get and analyze samples of the subject's spontaneous speech. With the help of the therapist and sign language interpreter, then, the researcher made the girl take the Korea Standard Receptive Vocabulary Test to know her developments in learning both oral and sign language-based receptive vocabularies.
Results : First, in relation to learning oral language, the subject showed changes in TTR(Type of Token Ration) as a semantic element from 0.43 in the 1st session to 0.58 in the 8th.(from 0.51 to 0.62 on part of the peer). In addition, the girl showed changes in MLU-c(Mean Length of Utterance in Clutters) as a syntactic element from 0.92 in the 1st session to 2.31 in the 8th(from 2.18 to 2.72 on part of the peer). Furthermore, the subject changes in communicative skills as a pragmatic element from request 44%, response 32%, objective utterance 16% and subjective statement 8% in the 1st session to objective utterance 39%, response 21%, subjective utterance 20% and request 20% in the 8th.
Second, under an environment life in her child care center, the subject showed changes in using the means of communication from oral language 68%, oral plus sign languages 24% and sign language 8% in the 1st session to oral language 96%, oral plus sign language 4% and sign language 0% in the 8th. While, under such environment life in her home, from sign language 82%. oral language 13% and oral plus sign languages 5% in the 1st session to oral plus sign languages 60%, sign language 16% and oral language 14% in the 6th.
Third, when the girl used oral language to communicate, points that she obtained from the Korea Standard Receptive Vocabulary Test improved by 44 from 42 in the 1st session to 83 in the 7th. The figure in the 7th session was higher by 6 than that in the same session the peer obtained, or 77 points. When she communicated with sign language, points that the subject obtained from the test increased by 16 from 61 in the 1st session to 77 in the 7th.
Conclusion : When the subject with hearing-impaired parents learned oral language in accordance with the early Edu-Care setting, she showed sustainable increases and positive improvements in terms of TTR, MLU-c and communicative skills which were semantic, syntactic and pragmatic elements, respectively. 96% of the girl's communications were done through oral language under an environment like in her child care center and 60%, thorough oral plus sign languages under such environment like in her home. This means that she became aware of which means of communication is more effective in different environments. This suggest that oral language experiences by children having hearing impairment are significantly related with environments given to those children. Points that the subject obtained from the Korea Standard Receptive Vocabulary Test were higher in terms of oral language than sign language. This suggest that oral language experiences by children having hearing impairment are significantly related with environments given to those children. For hearing-impaired children, whether their parents have the same disorder or not, appropriate experience together with peers having no hearing impairment in accordance with the early Edu-Care setting and activities at the child care center where a speech therapist is serving are necessary to develop their oral language development. Finally, the researcher hopes that subsequent, further researches are made about the double language of children who use both oral and sign languages and that more attention is paid to those researches.