Verbal Conceptualization in Deaf and Hearing Children

Verbalization tests

“…The inferior performance of deaf children on conceptual tasks has, in some cases (Meyer, 1953;Myklebust, 1953) been attributed exclusively to the deafness. Hughes (1961), however, shows that there is "NO statistically significant difference between the deaf and hearing of the same mental ability in percept and concept behaviour as reflected in the accuracy with which they relate known percepts to known concepts,'. The deaf actually performed better on percepts than concepts and the hearing children were better than the deaf with respect to words of higher and lower orders of generality or level of abstraction.…”

“…Heiders, Oleron, Templin and Myklebust (Rosenstein, 1962), have shown the deaf to be below average on tests requiring abstraction and reasoning processes. Hughes (1961) and Rosenstein (1961) are concerned with the relative difficulty for deaf children of conceptual as opposed to perceptual thought.…”

Deafness and the social meaning of language: A systemic perspective

“…But in these endeavors, their achievements are measured against hearing students. In empirical studies their written expressions have been meticulously studied as deviant productions, and have been evaluated in terms of number and inds of errors (Hughes 1966, I vimey and Lachterman 1980, Streng 1972, Yoshinaga-Itano and Snyder 1985. Almost no one has sought to examine how English is functioning in the lives of deaf students, to see what it does rather than what it does not do, to look at the choices they have made from the linguistic systems available to them instead of concentrating on the choices they have not made.…”

Chapter IV: The Deaf and the Hard of Hearing

“…In another study, Furth (1961a) confirmed his hypothesis that language experience is not a necessary prerequisite for the development of the basic capacity to abstract and to generalize, although it may increase efficiency of concept formation in certain situations. Hughes (1961) compared intellectually average deaf and hearing children on a percept-testing-concept-sorting task and found that the deaf performed better at the percept level than at the concept level and that the hearing performed better with words of higher and lower generality. Teaching should include what a concept is not as well as what it is.…”