Deaf children's revision behaviors in conversations

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Deaf Education

Background:

• Effective communication relies on strategies to repair breakdowns.
• Understanding how deaf children manage communication breakdowns is crucial for their language development.
• Previous research has explored communication strategies in various populations, but specific focus on deaf children's responses to listener cues is needed.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how school-age deaf children respond to a listener's signal of communication breakdown.
• To determine if deaf children's responses are associated with their syntactic or semantic abilities.
• To explore the relationship between communication breakdown responses and the children's typical mode of communication.

Main Methods:

• 14 deaf children aged 5 years 10 months to 8 years 11 months participated.
• During conversations, a "What?" probe (spoken and signed) was used to signal communication breakdown.
• Children's responses (Revision, Repetition, No Response) were analyzed, with revisions further categorized.

Main Results:

• Revisions were the most frequent response to communication breakdown probes.
• Most revisions involved changes within sentence constituents.
• The frequency of revisions, repetitions, and no responses correlated with the children's syntactic production abilities.

Conclusions:

• Deaf children utilize revisions as a primary strategy to repair communication breakdowns.
• Syntactic abilities play a significant role in deaf children's communication repair behaviors.
• These findings highlight the importance of supporting syntactic development in deaf children to enhance their conversational competence.