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Sign language as a communication prosthesis with language-impaired children

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Abstract

Many language-impaired children rely on telegraphic speech for expression. Functors such as prepositions and pronouns are mostly absent from their utterances. In an experimental analogue to clinical work, 14 3- to 11-year-old children with various levels of language impairment were exposed to drawings portraying a single scene. A meaningful sentence including either a pronoun or a preposition, which the children were not spontaneously using at pretesting, was associated with each drawing. Training the children to use the functors followed one of two approaches. The experimenter either vocalized the functor, or she vocalized and signed it. Results revealed that, for both functor acquisition and functor recall, speech and sign training was superior to speech training. Type of functor trained was also important, with prepositions faring better than pronouns. Reasons for this speech facilitation through signs, and issues related to implementation, are discussed.

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This research was supported in part under National Health Research and Development project No. 606-1240-44. The author expresses her appreciation to Mrs. Sandi Leibovitz-Bojm for her contribution in the early stages of the research, and to Dr. Jack Webber and the staff of Adventure Place for providing access to some children in their treatment group. Special thanks are due to Mrs. Ariane Blackman for her multifaceted input to the work.

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Konstantareas, M.M. Sign language as a communication prosthesis with language-impaired children. J Autism Dev Disord 14, 9–25 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02408552

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