Czech Deaf children's socio-cognitive and pragmatic competence assessed through Theory of Mind Task Battery
Abstract
Notwithstanding the substantial progress in the empirical research on deaf children's development, claims about deafness as a major developmental impediment are still pervasive in the medical discourse of the present day Czech society. Deaf have been declared to reach lower cognitive milestones compared to their hearing peers.
Deafness has thus been a blame for the failure of reaching cognitive potentials of these individuals vis-a-vis the mainstream societal standards. In a review of over 20 studies, Peterson (2009) demonstrates that even 11-year-old severely deaf children with hearing parents pass standard tasks assessing their social cognition, usually mastered by typically developing 5-year-olds.
These marked delays come in a sharp contrast with little or no delay documented in deaf children of signing parents. This may be due to the richness of their conversational input during their early ontogeny (e.g., Harris 2006).
Our study has been testing Czech deaf and hearing children's respective skills in theory of mind (ToM). To this date, 40 deaf children (20 Czech Sign Language users and 20 users of spoken Czech) and 20 hearing children were tested on the adapted battery of ToM skills (Hutchins & Prelock, 2010), assessing children's socio-cognitive skills including their understanding of others' beliefs, desires, emotions, and intentions.
These skills are central to children's pragmatic language competencies. Preliminary results seem to confirm our hypothesis in that Deaf Czech Sign language users are as competent as their hearing peers in their performance on the ToM battery of tasks, in a contrast to the Deaf users of spoken Czech.
As a first endeavor of this kind in the Czech Deaf community, our aim has been to document that deaf individuals can, indeed, reach the full potential as can their hearing peers, provided they have the tools to communicate with and represent through a complex independent language in whatever modality.