Deaf and hearing children's use of language describing temporal order among events

Six experiments are described in which deaf and hearing subjects decided the temporal order of events in picture series and in sentences. The deaf subjects, eight and 11 years old, performed as well as hearing children on a nonverbal picture seriation task. Both deaf and hearing subjects also described most picture series in the natural left-to-right order in which they were shown, and identified the left-hand picture in most series as happening first and the right-hand picture as happening last. In most respects, the deaf children's linguistic performance resembled that of much younger hearing children. Two major results were that deaf children generally used a sequence of simple sentences to describe the events shown in a picture series, and responded to most multiple-clause sentences presented as though the events being described had occurred in the order they were mentioned.