Psychological assessment of deaf children

This article describes two research studies on prelingually profoundly deaf children. The first study is on deaf children aged 3.5 to 4.25 years, and the second on deaf children aged 4 to 6 years. Both studies show that speech and speech reading skills in deaf preschool children age 3.5 to 6 years depend strongly on fine motor skill of hand and mouth, successive memory and memory for rhythm. These three interdependent skills are taken as three aspects of eupraxia. Eupraxia is an even stronger predictor of speech and speech reading skill than hearing loss. In deaf children aged 4 to 6, eupraxia is predictive of later reading decoding skills. The second study shows that the visual memory skills of deaf children aged 4 to 6 are predictive of their later passive written vocabulary and reading comprehension skills. Both studies show that on the basis of eupraxia with or without oral language skills statistically significant predictions can be made about later school placement in oral deaf schools, non-oral deaf schools or mainstreaming in regular schools. A diagnostic model is formulated in which eupraxia and visual cognition, as a theory on the normal language development of deaf children, can explain individual differences between deaf children with regard to oral and written communication skills.