Communicating about pretend play: A comparison of the utterances of 4-year-old normally hearing and deaf or hard-of-hearing children in an integrated kindergarten

Abstract

The pretend-play utterances of 4 hearing-impaired and 4 normally hearing preschool students were examined to investigate developmental differences between these two groups of children. The study focused on pretend-play utterances related to objects, roles, and actions. Three videotaped samples of free indoor-play sessions were coded for each subject. Statistical analyses of the data indicated that, compared to the normally hearing children, the hearing-impaired children used significantly higher proportions of literal (as opposed to nonliteral) object utterances and current-action (as opposed to scripted) utterances. The article discusses implications of these findings for both groups of chi..