Newsgroups: bit.listserv.deaf-l
Date:         Fri, 14 Aug 1992 22:06:54 EDT
From:         -- <sipb7@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
Subject:      Gifted and Deaf/Hard-of-Hearing
X-To:         deaf-l%siucvmb.bitnet@mitvma.mit.edu

[from _Highly Gifted Children,_ the newsletter of the Hollingworth
Center for Highly Gifted Children, vol. VII, no. 2, Spring 1991.]

"Emotional Needs of Gifted Hearing-Impaired [sic] Children"

Robert Basil, Ph.D.

Imagine a mind that at birth is extremely sensitive, actively
developing and seeking to grasp and understand what is around, but
there is one type of information the mind will never receive--audio
information.  Touch, taste, smell and vision are received and
pondered, but any auditory information mistakenly given by caregivers
is missed.  If you are a gifted, deaf child who has deaf parents,
there is literally no problem.  *In fact, recent studies suggest that
deaf children of deaf parents are 8 times as likely to be gifted as
hearing children of *hearing* parents* [emphasis added].  We suspect
that the use of manual sign languages allows children to acquire
language skills earlier than verbal languages.  This gives them an
earlier language base from which to develop their cognitive skills.
As a parent of two young children, I am using sign language in
addition to verbal language.  My son's first "word" was the sign for
"finished", an adverb[*] that is not usually learned verbally until
much later language development has occurred, but a sign that is
easily made and readily learned by most children.

[*]I wouldn't equate the ASL sign FINISH with the English adverb
"finished".  I've noticed students in my dorm use the single sign
FINISH to mean "I did it".  E.g.: "SHOWER FINISH YOU?" "FINISH."

American Sign Language (ASL) has been recognized as a language and
allowed to be taught in the schools in our state as a second or
"foreign" language only in the last year.  The long standing debate in
the field of deafness over "oral" methods vs. "manual" methods has
given way to tailoring the educational method to meet the individual
needs of the child, and using whatever method is most appropriate for
that child.  This is certainly an improvement for the field.

However, the field has not developed very far regarding gifted and
highly gifted, hearing-impaired children.  It has been difficult for
our schools to cope with educating gifted children.  It has been
difficult for schools to cope with educating hearing-impaired
children.  For the schools to cope with hearing-impaired *and* gifted
children has been nearly impossible.  In a few places around the
country, there have been programs established for a few elementary
grades.

We are formally surveying about 35 schools nationwide to ask a wide
variety of psychological and educational questions about any gifted,
hearing-impaired children in their programs.  This survey is funded by
a grant from the MENSA Research Foundation.  We are particularly
interested in the emotional problems these children may be having.
While deaf children of deaf parents generally do not have particular
difficulty coping with a hearing world, these families make up 10% of
the hearing-impaired community.  90% of deaf children have *hearing*
parents.  This means that they are exposed to language much later than
other children.  It means that any gifted potential has to be
*translated* in order to be measured by existing psychological
measures of intelligence.  It means that hearing parents do not have
the knowledge to teach their hearing-impaired children how to cope
emotionally with living in a hearing world.

The president of Gallaudet University, Dr. King Jordan, who is himself
a deaf psychologist, has said in an interview on "60 Minutes" that
"deaf people can do anything".  Gifted and highly gifted, hearing-
impaired children can do anything they wish *if* someone bridges the
communication gap and teaches them what they intensely want to learn.
This education must include coping with the emotions of living in a
hearing world.  We hope this survey will help give us an understanding
of the kinds of problems these children face, and help us devise wyas
of meeting their needs.

If you know of a gifted or highly gifted, hearing-impaired child whose
family would like to be included in this survey, please have the
family contact:

Dr. Robert N. Basil
Ellis Human Development Institute
9 N. Edwin C. Moses Blvd.
Dayton, OH 45407
(513) 873-4300 (Thursdays)

[Dr. Basil is a clinical psychologist associated with the School of
Professional Psychology and the SENG program (Supporting Emotional
Needs of the Gifted) at Wright State University.  He is currently
developing a training program for health professionals working with
hearing-impaired clients and training interpreters to work in mental
health settings.]

--
::: A fundamentalist preacher who can't read Hebrew deserves as much  :::
::: attention as a heart surgeon who has never handled a stethoscope. :::
seth gordon  <sipb7@athena.mit.edu>   . . . these opinions for rent
the learning center for deaf children . . . associate teacher-counselor
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