Discourse rules in the language productions of deaf and hearing children

A variety of studies has documented lags in deaf children's development of literacy-related skills relative to hearing age-mates. Among the reported differences is the finding that deaf children typically do not appear to make use of discourse rules in structuring their writing. In the present study, we compared signed and written productions by deaf 7- to 15-year-olds to oral and written productions of hearing age-mates. Two studies demonstrated that signed and oral productions had similar discourse structures as indicated by the patterns of causal goal-action-outcome episodes (Trabasso, van den Broek, & Suh, 1989). Written productions in Experiment 2 also revealed comparable discourse organization for the two samples, but the grammatical and lexical character of deaf children's writing lagged behind that of the hearing children. The results indicate that deaf children make use of discourse rules in narrative production, but that these may be obscured by disfluencies in writing.