Case studies of pronoun development in two hearing-impaired children: normal, delayed or deviant?

This paper is a study of first and second person pronoun development in the spoken language of two young hearing-impaired children. Pronoun development was examined over a period of 11 months, starting at the age of 29 and 28 months, to determine whether the children's acquisition of these pronouns would reflect normal, delayed or deviant patterns of development. Comparison of data from these children with data regarding normally developing children shows the hearing-impaired children's acquisition to be within normal expectations for hearing age and overall linguistic level, and only slightly delayed in terms of chronological age. These results lend support to the view that differences in the hearing-impaired child's language ability are probably the result of a relative lack of auditory and linguistic experience, rather than reorganisation of the hearing-impaired child's psychological and cognitive processing abilities.