Features of the Body Scheme in Hearing Impaired Children of Primary School Age

Abstract

Body scheme plays an important role in the development of educational skills such as reading and writing, visual-spatial thinking, spatial gnosis, optical-spatial strategies. Children of primary school age with hearing impairment have left hemispheric and right hemispheric insufficiency, difficulties in interhemispheric interaction and the integrity of perception. This hinders their full integration into the educational process and reduces their adaptive abilities. The study of the body scheme in hearing impaired children of primary school age was the goal of an empirical work, and a hypothesis was the assumption of the existence of features of its structural organization. Respondents aged 8,97±0,76 years (N=60) participated in the study. 30 hearing impaired primary schoolchildren (12 female children and 18 male children) were included in the experimental group and 30 junior schoolchildren without hearing impairments (14 female children and 16 males) entered the control group. Neuropsychological tests were used to assess the neuropsychological parameters of the body scheme. The results obtained attest to the features of the body scheme in hearing impaired children of primary school age. It was found that the ideas about their own body, the organization of movements in relation to the body scheme and the perception of space in children with hearing impairments are formed to a lesser extent than in children of the control group.