Early lipreading ability and speech and language development of hearing-impaired pre-schoolers

Abstract

Very strong opinions are held about how children born with severely or profoundly impaired hearing should be taught to communicate. For many years, signing was prohibited in schools in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. More recently, Sacks (1989) has advocated that the sign language of the deaf community is the natural language of deaf people. A compromise adopted by many schools educating children with impaired hearing is “total�? or “simultaneous�? communication-the use of simultaneously signed and spoken English, where the message is identical in both modes including morpheme markers. By exposing children to precise signed English, it was intended that grammatically well-structured langua..