PARENTS ’ SENSITIVITY TO THEIR DEAF CHILDREN ’ S DIVERSE COMMUNICATION NEEDS

Despite access to earlier diagnosis, intervention and enhanced technology, deaf children’s communication needs continue to present challenges to parents and educators. Given the heterogeneity of deaf children and the numerous factors contributing to their language outcomes, there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution to communication. This paper presents the findings of a research study that investigated the impact of bimodal bilingual input on the communication and language development of young deaf children. The participants in the longitudinal study were eight severe to profoundly deaf young children and their hearing parents who adopted a bimodal bilingual (English and Australian Sign Language) approach to communication. The impact of the bilingual approach on the children’s language outcomes was measured in terms of the quality of the parents’ bilingual input, their sensitivity to their children’s communication needs and their accommodation of their children’s changing modality preferences. Several assessment tools were devised specifically for this study and will be described in this paper. The study found that the children’s language outcomes were strongly predicted by parent sensitivity and that the children with the strongest bilingual skills changed their modality preferences throughout the 20 months of data collection. This paper will discuss the implications of the findings in terms of effective early intervention practice that supports parents’ use of a bilingual approach to maximize the language outcomes for their deaf children. INTRODUCTION: Between one and three infants in every thousand are born with permanent childhood deafness (Holte et al., 2012). More than 90 percent of these deaf babies are born to hearing parents, most of whom have had very little experience in dealing with the implications of deafness on a child’s communication and language development (Marschark, 2001). For many years, the language delays of deaf children with hearing parents have been attributed to a reduced level of access to quality language experiences compared to hearing children (Marschark and Wauters, 2011). We know from the research literature that parents and caregivers play an important role in their child’s development of communication and acquisition of language (Ninio & Snow, 1999). However, it is a challenging task for many parents to understand the communicative potential of their deaf child and to acquire the necessary skills to accommodate their child’s specific communication needs. Regardless of whether their child is deaf or hearing, the parents’ role is to facilitate language development by providing effective scaffolding and by being sensitive and responsive to their children’s communication (Janjua et al., 2002). Moreover, responsive parents will show sensitivity to their children’s referential signals and topics of interest, frequently commenting on events in the surrounding environment. They intuitively adapt their interactive behaviours by way of a high degree of contingency to facilitate their children’s language acquisition and adjust their communication style to suit the diverse needs of their child (Abu Bakar, Brown, and Remine, 2010; Janjua et al., 2002).