Revision behaviors of normal and hearing-impaired children

Children's response to communicative failure was evaluated in terms of linguistic and nonlinguistic behaviors. Six hearing-impaired and six normal-hearing children served as subjects. Each group was comprised of three children at each of brown's language stages I and III. Each child was engaged in spontaneous play and received the communicative failure cure "What?" on 20 occasions. Videorecorded responses were scored as repetitions, revisions, or no responses. Revisions were analyzed and categorized into one of nine categories according to linguistic and nonlinguistic structures. Results revealed that both groups of subjects used linguistic and nonlinguistic information in this revision behavior. However, the two groups differed in their pattern of revision behaviors. The hearing-impaired subjects, unlike the normal-hearing subjects, used less linguistic revision behaviors regardless of language development. Findings showed that the nonlinguistic as well as linguistic information may be important considerations when evaluating language with the hearing impaired.