Tuesday, 11 September 2012
DCAL
Deaf Children Development Conference
NEW SPEAKER: Hello everybody, good morning, thank you so much for coming,
we are so proud that everybody said would come has come, they are all here we are
so proud to be able to present all our research to you today. I just wanted to say a
few words about where the ideas for this conference came from. The ideas came
from this person, Lilli Risner who works in our research centre, she coordinates all
our activity that means research and community, research and people outside of the
university. She is the bridge between people who need to read research, need to
find out about research for their work, families, their lives and the researchers
themselves who sometimes forget about the people outside of the university, what
they need to know and Lilli Risner keeps us on our toes. She thought this would be
a good opportunity to present our research in an accessible, easy to understand
digestive form, so you can take it away and use it in every day life, practice, policy
making etcetera. I just wanted to say thank you first of all to Lilli for pushing this
forward and getting us here to this point today. Unfortunately Lilli has got to do all
the organising outside of this room so she is disappearing now. She didn't want to
stay and help me present the conference this morning. So thank you. Okay,
thank you again for coming. I just want to, before we start off, give some thanks to
people who have made the conference possible. First of all, I want to thank City
University, this is where you are now, they provided us with lots of support, audio
visual support, with technical support, catering support later on, all these things that
take a lot of time, a lot of different people from the university helping us. Secondly I
want to thank UCL, that's another university, University College London, that's their
symbol on the screen there. UCL helped us in a big way because they have a public
engagement fund, money to pay for events like this and it's called the beacon, like a
lighthouse, the beacon fund, and it enables researchers to organise events like this
and get their message across to people who may not normally come to university
events. The last big thank you is probably the biggest contribution to today and to all
of our research at the DCAL centre, the ESRC, that's their symbol there, you may
have seen their logo outside in the foyer. The Economic and Social Research
Council have put consistent funding into our research for 10 plus years. For many
years they have funded our research and they also provide very rigorous evaluation
of what we do - is our research doing what it's supposed to be doing, are our
messages getting across to people out there. The ESRC take care in making sure
that researchers don't go off on their own on a long lonely journey, that they stay on
the path of the public, engaging the social scientists around the country, the
community, children, teachers, all of these people. So thank you again to the ESRC.
We have a person from the ESRC here so if anybody wants to hear more about what
ESRC do I'm sure Tim Wright - where are you, Tim, right at the back - he is the
ESRC. Now, the event isn't just today, it's not just happening today it's
happening in all these new and wonderful ways. It's happening as a blog, so if you
are all bloggers you can today log on to your computers and your phones and you
can take part in blogging. You can take part in twitter as well and here is the hash
tag for the conference on twitter as well. This will continue after the event. It will
continue in the days following the event where people will probably want to discuss
things that they have heard today, but didn't have an opportunity to get those ideas
out, those disagreements, those agreements, all that lovely debate. We will be using
our electronic sites to host that debate as the conference begins to finish today and
into tomorrow and the following days. Hopefully you can all access that information.
Now, we also have the opportunity in this room to have everything filmed. At the
back of the room there is a recording device that records all the presentations, all the
discussion, all the debate etcetera and we are able to put that on the web in chat to
format. If you want to tell your colleagues who couldn't come they can get on to the
website and download or watch the presentations that they weren't able to see
today. If you want to see the presentations again, go through things again, we've got
all of that as well. We are very modern at City University and at DCAL. Thank you
again to everybody and looking around lots of people I recognise, old students, old
researchers, teachers who I have had contact with, we are all very pleased that
you've taken the time to come here. It's a big chunk of your time, a full day, and we
really are pleased you've decided it's worth it. Hopefully we will give you the
information you need, but you must ask us, you must feel brave to be able to come
and talk to us today and get more out of what we are telling you, if you need more
questions, more answers. I just wanted to talk a little bit about the aims of
today. This is really people who I have worked with in the past, especially deaf
researchers, deaf teachers. They say to me “what are you doing to change things?
It's okay you doing all of this research at the university about theoretical questions,
but also what's happening with practical policy questions?” I think this is a virtuous
circle, not a vicious circle. A lot of our research can be accessible, relevant and
useful. Of course some research needs to be done that's maybe more pure science,
it needs to be done first before it can be rolled out for practical implications, but a lot
of our research, as soon as we are doing it, can be made accessible, relevant and
useful. Why is that important? Of course anybody here who is involved in policy or
practice, so who work with deaf children or have family members or are associated
with deaf children, you need to know what kind of research should inform and give
evidence to your practice and we talk a lot about this, evidence based practice, that's
really difficult if the information isn't accessible and relevant for your practice, so I
think that research really would benefit by this circle and this is the sort of aim of
today. If we hear about what are you doing, what you need to know, that will benefit
how we do our research and how we do our research hopefully should benefit your
practice. You know, we can keep this debate and discussion going, at least we are
talking to each other. So I just want to tell you a little bit, if you don't know,
about DCAL. DCAL stands for deafness cognition, that's all the thinking, the things
that go on in your head, the cognition and the language. So really we are a research
centre funded by the ESRC to carry out research in the broader sense related to
deafness. Everything that you could research that relates to deafness, language and
cognition and thinking, that includes literacy, esteem, positive esteem, social and
emotional development, interaction with the web, the internet, lots and lots of
different research topics are happening at DCAL. Only a proportion of that research
is relevant for children. A lot of the research we do is relevant for other deaf people,
adults, interpreters, people learning sign language and today is all about the deaf
children research that we do at our centre. No organisation is anything without
people and we are very fortunate that we have a really good mix of people who have
got research expertise in a wide area, in languages, psychology, clinical research, in
neuroscience, all the sort of areas of research that will contribute, social linguistics,
interpreters, all the things we do, we have researchers who themselves are experts
in those fields. A constant thought for us that we are always trying to keep at the
forefront of our thinking is that we research with deaf people. We are not a research
centre that does research on deaf people, on the deaf community. We constantly try
and train and have active members, deaf people, in our research centre, deaf people
with PhDs, with post docs, international research experience. They are working as
colleagues and collaborators with us in our research centre.
What are the aims of today? To get across to you in an accessible way what kind of
research we are doing. We've prepared a summary of all our research in hopefully a
really accessible way to read about research. Rather than go away and say I have
got to read those 15 research papers and never have the time to do it, we've made a
booklet and we'll be giving this to you at the end of today so that you don't take it
away and then don't listen to us, we want you to stay for as long as you can. This is
summarised; 6 years of research in take home messages. Three things that you
need to know about each of the presentations this morning. We've worked with our
researchers to get them to put down in an accessible, relevant, useful way, what the
research means for practice and policy, the take home messages, and this is what
we'll be giving to you at the end of today. This is the dissemination of our research in
a way that you should be able to understand and tell all your colleagues about
tomorrow without having to say I need to go to the library. We really want to consult
with you about what we are doing next in our research. We've got lots of things in
the afternoon planned that you can engage with us and provoke us and get us
thinking about new ideas. So this morning we are doing research briefings,
these are short presentations that hopefully give you bang bang bang, the take home
message in an easy to understand way and then lots of time for questions. These
are the take home messages that you will have later on today. We are going to go
through those this morning and in the afternoon we've decided to do a new thing, we
haven't tried it before. Hopefully we need your help to make it work, it's question
time, like any questions on the TV, the radio. We've got a panel of experts and
we've asked you for questions, you've sent us all your questions, we've selected the
best, the most relevant. People are going to stand up and ask those questions to a
panel of experts and we are going to get a wide view of views and opinions from
those experts this afternoon and finally if we can make it to the end of the day with
full energy, we've got tea and coffee to give us some caffeine and get us going, then
we are going to work on some future research plans. We want you to listen to us
and we want to listen to you about that. Hopefully that's an exciting day, I'm really
excited, I hope everybody gets something out of this. Please remember that this
conference is about you talking to us and us talking to you. There is lots of time for
networking, we haven't got a coffee break this morning, we've got a networking
break. So I'm going to pass over to my colleague Mairead MacSweeney.
Mairead MacSweeney is going to present her research, team of researchers, who
have been working on areas to do with how the brain processes language and
speech and lipreading, speech reading. Thank you. MAIREAD: Hopefully we
manage to live up to this big build up of how exciting the day is going to be. Let's
see if we can make a good start. I, as many of you know, many of you here have
been involved in some of the research I have done, I have done a lot of work in
looking at how the brain processes language in deaf adults. We are about to use
some of this work to deaf children. Today I'm going to focus very specifically on the
issue of reading and the research that I have done that may provide some insights
into how deaf children learn to read and what we may gain from scientific research
about how to inform the reading education of deaf children. So as everybody in
this room knows, I'm sure, despite the fact that the majority of deaf children have non
verbal IQ, the vast majority of children born severely profoundly deaf do find reading
to be an incredibly difficult task. This is what I'm concerned with and of course
reading is an incredibly important skill because poor literacy not only affects
educational outcomes it ultimately affects employment, wellbeing and mental health.
If I wasn't talking to this audience at this point I would say that often people find it
surprising that deaf children find it difficult to read, because many people think
reading is a visual task, their eyes work fine, what's the problem. You all know there
is a lot more to it than that. Why it's so difficult is because we read a spoken
language, and if you have limited access to that spoken language then you are going
to face challenges. So you all know all that. What do we know from research about
what are the key factors to success in reading for deaf children. Well, we do know
across a range of studies that rich early language experience is critical, is important,
so whether it is in speech or sign and I'm just presenting a sub set of data from one
of my studies with deaf adults here and on the left we have data from deaf people
with hearing impairments, so non native signers, these are adults, and here on the
right deaf native signers, using British Sign Language and reading age. What's
important to look at here is the solid bar across the middle, that shows the average
performance of the group, what we see in these data and many other data sets that
have been published, you see deaf native signers, brought up using BSL, are on
average better readers than non native signers. It suggests then that this rich early
experience is really important in this case for this later learning of a second
language, English. So although the first language is BSL, learning English later, this
rich early language experience is giving them a boost over their deaf peers who
haven't had this rich language experience.
Now, that is maybe quite a glib statement. The reason I have presented the data in
this way with the spread of scores is to show there's massive variability within these
two groups and actually if we took this group of deaf adults here, the best readers
are actually on the left hand side and don't have this rich early experience. So there
is this massive spread of ability but the important thing is when we look at a group,
and group contrast, that we see this early experience of language and any language
it seems is important to reading, giving you that robust language foundation.
Nevertheless, I am going to focus on how important spoken language is to reading,
because of course when we read we read a spoken language. You have to have
some knowledge of spoken language to access the writing on the page. So for a
deaf child born using sign language at their first language, they have this really
robust first language base upon which to build then their spoken language
knowledge. The research I'm going to talk about in the first part of my talk addresses
whether there is a role for lip reading in reading development in deaf children. So I
will actually be calling lip reading "speech reading" through this talk because this is
the term we more commonly use in the literature and this is more simply because
when you are getting information from the face about speech you are not only
looking at the lips, you are getting information from all of the rest of the face as well,
the jaw and everything else, so we more commonly term it speech reading.
Okay so I'm not sure how many people have had your coffee yet but I'm going to
give you some examples from a test we developed in collaboration with a number of
speech and language therapists, some of whom are here, to test deaf children's
speech reading skills. So children sit at the computer and they see a video and in
the first test, the first phase of the test, they have to see single lexical items and they
have to choose from this array what they saw. So if you have a look ... any
suggestions? Absolutely, nice and easy.
So now the test has three different phases, so you have single lexical items and then
you have single sentences and then we have what we call stories, and these are two
or three connected sentences and then you are asked questions at the end. It is
presented here in English, in written English, but we also had it in BSL for the
children. So I'm going to show this now, if everybody watches (screen).
So the question is where was Ben going?
FROM THE FLOOR: School.
MAIREAD: School! You are all very good, you all have had your coffee this
morning. So maybe I don't need to show it again. What did he buy is the second
question? There we go, so everybody is very good at this thing. So I've shown you
a relatively easy one ‑‑ remember this is designed for children ‑‑ I'm going to show
you that we have designed a similar assessment for adults which is slightly more
difficult. So what do we find when we use this test, when we validated this test with
deaf and hearing kids? So Fiona Kyle was the researcher had a worked on this
project which is now in press about to be published and she tested nearly 100 deaf
and 100 hearing children ranging from 5 to 14 and interestingly she found no
difference in lip reading skill between deaf and hearing children on this test. What
she did find as well, is that in both of the groups, both the deaf and hearing children,
that lip reading skill positively correlated with reading ability. And this was even after
we controlled for ‑‑ which means we took into account ‑‑ the age of the children and
the non‑verbal IQ of the children. So what I'm showing you in this plot is if you look
at the green dots there, all the dots for the hearing children and then the open circles
for the deaf kids, you can see that the two lines are slightly separated because the
deaf children are poorer readers than the hearing children, but there is significant
and strong positive correlation between how well you read and how well you speech
read.
Now, speech reading, Fiona Kyle has also shown in a previous study that speech
reading not only correlates with reading ‑‑ so if we show that two things correlate
with each other, it doesn't actually tell us much about causality, it doesn't tell us what
is influencing the other, it doesn't tell us one is driving the other, because the
measurements are taken at the same point in time. So Fiona Kyle and Mark Harris
in a previous study have conducted a longitudinal study, so they measured children's
reading and speech reading skill when they were around 7 years old and then they
looked at them again 3 years later and they showed that speech reading, so lip
reading skill in young deaf children, was a very strong predicter of their later reading
ability. So there seems to be a very important relationship between how well you
can derive speech information from the lips and then reading ‑‑ so sorry, let me say
that again. How well you can derive English information from the lips and then
reading that English information written down.
I'm going to give you another little piece of data before I kind of put this together and
what this might mean and where we might go with these findings. I mentioned a
moment ago we have a similar test of speech reading ability for deaf adults,
developed by Tara Mohammed a few years ago now, and interestingly in her study
with adults she repeatedly found that deaf adults were better speech readers, better
lip readers, that hearing adults. So here we have this conundrum, but remember
what I told you a minute ago, that in our five to 14 years old there is no difference in
lip reading ability between deaf and hearing kids, but then when we look at adults
from 18 onwards deaf people are better then at lip reading than hearing adults. So
we are missing this bit in the middle, we are missing these 14 to 18 years old, we
don't know what's happening there, we need to do some longitudinal studies perhaps
to look at the trajectory of speech reading development in deaf and in hearing
children, because it could be that hearing children really rely on ‑‑ not rely on it, but
use speech reading information when they are young to develop their spoken
language and their reading as well and actually we have quite a lot of data
suggesting that this is the case, that speech reading is important for hearing kids, not
just for deaf kids, and maybe even very important for hearing children who have
reading difficulties. But then it could be that hearing adults, their reliance on visual
speech drops away; or it could be that, as deaf adults, you maybe go through
adolescence and into adulthood you have more and more lip reading experience,
and perhaps that's what this data means. At this point I could say, after showing you
the data I have showed, I could say, right so we think speech reading is important,
we think you should go out and train deaf children in speech reading: that's not what
I'm saying. We need to test this properly. So I'm applying at the moment for funding
to test whether ‑‑ let me get this right, whether ‑‑ I've just been told I have five
minutes. Really? That was very quick! I must have been rambling a lot, I'm sorry!
Okay, so what we are planning to do is testing deaf kids on training speech reading,
so getting kids on the computer and giving them games to do on their own and then
testing them in a proper controlled trial in school, whether training them on speech
reading boosts their awareness of the internal structure of words, which is what we
think is going on. Boosts their understanding that, for example, "cat" breaks down
into C‑A‑T and that this is what's important for reading. We know that phonological
awareness plays an important role in hearing for hearing children and also for deaf
children and so this is what we are proposing to do in the future. I can talk more
about that in questions. I feel like I've gone over that, but I do very quickly want to
measure another angle on phonology that I'm interested in at the moment and that
our research is leading us into, which is that of course of course words have a
phonological structure, a structure of things that we can break an item down into
smaller parts that don't mean anything like K‑A‑T and the and the same for signs,
the name word can be broken down into the word the hand shape and the
movement. In one of our studies we asked deaf adults in a scanner here are two
pictures, chair, bear, do the English words rhymes and here are two pictures, beard,
nut, do the BSL signs share the same location? And we see extremely similar
networks in the brain, this is the left side of the brain, I'm showing you activation in
the frontal part of the brain, in broker's area, that part here and what is called the
parietal part back here so very similar activation when deaf people make decisions
about BSL structure, the location in this case, and when hearing people make
decisions about the sound in English words. And then we have data from other
neuro‑imaging studies with data suggesting the same thing so another idea I'm
thinking about is whether, if we could boost deaf children's phonological awareness
of speech, by first thinking about their phonological awareness of signs and playing
games with them and training them and trying to make them aware that we can have
signs like "cat" and that they are made up of things that can be broken down into
elements that you can change the hand shape, for example, and you make a
different sign, or you change the location. So we can have "sister" and we just
change the location and we can have "chocolate", you know, those kinds of games
to show them that things can be broken down and re‑combined into new lexical
items, maybe playing these kinds of games might get this infrastructure in the brain,
if you like, up and running which might enable them to get a handle on phonological
awareness of spoken words which is so important for reading.
This is a little bit of a mad idea and I would be very interested to hear about whether
teachers or any speech and language therapists in the audience have tried that kind
of approach before. So just to acknowledge all the people involved in the team,
Fiona Kyle, Margaret Harris, and Tara Mohammed, and I have been told I have one
minute left for questions, so I've rushed the last bit but thank you.
[applause].
GARY: What we decided to do was to save time if anybody wants to ask a question
if they just stand up and ask it in sign or speech the interpreters will cope, they have
said they can. We trust their ability. Normally people used to come down using sign
language, but that might take a bit too much time. We've got 10 minutes for
questions, please. NEW SPEAKER: Hi, I was interested to know whether, given
that things that seem to be important for reading are early language, lipreading and
chronological awareness, whether in your research into adults or children you've
looked at adults or children who had access to English through speech, which gives
all those three things. NEW SPEAKER: That's a great question and we haven't
because I think in this country we just haven't got access to the numbers of children
at the moment, maybe you can tell me this is changing, but up until now anyway it
seems as though we haven't got access to the number of deaf children, we would
need to do a proper study to look at that but you are probably aware of the research
from Belgium from Jacqueline Labear’s(?) group which has looked at children who
have used cued speech and your data suggests excellent outcomes when deaf
children have used cued speech. Maybe it's a bit early for me to be pinning my
colours to the mast, but I'm a very strong opponent of investigating using cued
speech in a bilingual setting, which has been used in France successfully. The
evidence is there to suggest that would be really beneficial to deaf children. NEW
SPEAKER: Just by way of going on from that, and I'm not particularly familiar with
cued speech, is there a difference in terms of the results, outcomes for those who
speak English and Belgian? Can we transfer Belgian results and apply them here or
French results and apply them here? I'm not familiar with it. NEW SPEAKER: So
there are issues about how regular a language is and by regular I mean for example
that C would always be pronounced at CA, but English is not like that at all. That's
why it's incredibly difficult to learn to read. So the cross linguistic comparisons are
tricky, but I think with the French, that we can make the contrast, I think we can say
that there would be benefits, similar benefits to deaf children reading English, yes,
but a lot of those cross linguistics studies haven't been done. NEW SPEAKER:
You were talking about the phonological awareness of cat with sign language,
looking at location and with speech, but where is the value in spelling and visual
rhyme, not sound rhyme, but seeing visual patterns? I just wondered what the
comparison there was. NEW SPEAKER: You are absolutely right. So in a lot of
our studies we will take what you are calling visual rhyme, the letter pattern, into
account and it's been repeatedly shown by us and many others that deaf people are
much better to say that. Even if you present words as pictures, they are much better
to say cat and mat rhyme because the ‘at’ is spelt the same, than chair and bear,
where the spelling is different. It's incredibly useful. We all use it. Even hearing
adults it affects in behavioural data, not inaccuracy, but sometimes in the action time
you can see those visual rhymes. We factor that into our studies by accounting for it
and controlling for it. NEW SPEAKER: Have we got time for one more question?
NEW SPEAKER: Where I worked some schools use the ruthless scheme for
reading - are you aware of that? NEW SPEAKER: Yes. NEW SPEAKER: That
actually looks at the written form like chair, bear in the way it's used, I just wanted to
know if you are aware of it and how it can support deaf children, the visual written
word. NEW SPEAKER: Yeah, I am aware of it from my own child. I'm not aware
of how it may be applied or used specifically with deaf children. For example, I'm
talking about speech reading training. One of the ideas we have there, if we get the
funding, is to have the visual speech face and then to have the matching, when you
can see -- to have timing of the letters appear, not single letters, but as they match
the phonology of what they see, that's where this mapping of the visual patterns and
the visual patterns on the face really draw on that to help develop those links, but
thank you, I will look at that scheme. GARY: Thank you. NEW SPEAKER:
Moving swiftly on. GARY: The next presentation is some work we've been doing on
what happens when children don't learn sign language like they should be learning
and this is a big project that had deaf and hearing people working. We are lucky
today, we've got both a deaf researcher and Ros Herman from City University, so
Kate Rowley and Ros Herman presenting today. NEW SPEAKER: I want to
acknowledge this is research completed as part of a team which Gary led very
effectively and to acknowledge Chloe and Katie's work. This is looking at deaf
children who have some difficulties learning a sign language, something that
certainly interested me, but I know also interests other sorts of people. From a
researcher point of view it's always interesting to know how something that happens
in a different language and modality compares, so it gives you an opportunity to
compare something that we know about quite a lot in the spoken language, we know
hearing children have specific language impairments, but we didn't know whether
deaf children had something like this as well. Practitioners are particularly interested
in this because I think many of you will know there are children in the classrooms
you've worked in who do have really, really difficult times learning a language, it's not
the same as other deaf children. Sometimes there is a child in your class who
doesn't seem to be moving forward. We know that with hearing children this is
something that is possible to identify early. We can offer hearing children support for
this sort of difficulty, but if we are not spotting it effectively in deaf children then deaf
children might be missing out. It is the area we wanted to look at. I mentioned
before that specific language impairment – SLI, I'm going to call it - occurs in 7 per
cent of hearing children and it occurs in children who haven't got other sorts of
problems that might explain it. These are not children who have got delayed
development or social communication problems or any other neurological problems.
One of the challenges though is that in order to be diagnosed as a hearing child with
a specific language impairment, deafness is the exclusion in the criteria because of
course if you are deaf you are also likely to have an impact on your spoken language
acquisition. This means historically we haven't really identified SLI in a deaf child,
but logically it could exist. We know in some cases SLI in hearing children is
inherited, deaf children might also have that hereditary pattern. Language
impairment can be caused by difficulties at birth and deaf children have the same
sort of early difficulties at birth, we thought looking into the sign language would
allow us to, if you like, move away from the problems that we know some deaf
children have learning a spoken language. If deaf children are getting access to sign
language then the access is (inaudible) so the question really that we were looking at
was does it exist? Does it look like SLI spoken language? How are we actually
going to find out about it because there really are not the measures that there are to
look at spoken language SLI for sign language. Who are we going to compare these
children to? These are sign language learners; you can't compare the hearing
children with SLI because the language is different. Who can we compare them to?
Now many of you, I think, will know that the majority, the vast majority of deaf
children have hearing parents and in this group language delay is really the norm.
That gives us another problem. If we are looking at a child who might have a
language impairment when the group as a whole has language delay it's going to be
difficult to tease those things apart. Another factor is when you are using sign
language you are communicating a visual medium. There are other things you can
do to help you communicate. You can use things like gesture. You are allowed, if
you like, to compensate in some cases, using things like gesture and in fact the
community as a whole is very tolerant of people with different levels of skill in sign
language. This makes it difficult to identify children who have this persistent, very
specific type of difficulty. The other challenge was that until recently there weren't
any measures of sign language to be able to say whether children were having
particular problems or not, but luckily in recent years we have had some views and in
this project we did a test that Kate is going to tell you about in a minute. I'm going to
start off by telling you about a child we met very early on, Gary and I, in the clinical
facility in the university who sparked our interest. We are going to call him Paul. He
was 5 years old and born deaf to a deaf family, in other words he had had really
good language input in BSL from birth and there were no worries about his other
aspects of development, his problems with development, but there were concerns
about his language. He was at the time attending a mainstream school with some
support and a very good level of support, I have to say. Sometimes deaf children
don't always get such good support, but he had very little language. He actually
asked for repetitions and regularly misunderstood classroom instructions when they
were delivered through his interpreter. We had opportunities to assess him and we
found out his vocabulary was pretty good. He had a reasonable vocabulary and the
way he produced signs was fine. He signed clearly, but his understanding of
sentences in BSL and grammatical aspects was poor. When we tested it over a
period of time it seemed to deteriorate. It was below what you would expect from a
child of this sort of background with good input from birth. He also had quite an
unusual pattern of errors, some of the things we thought he would understand,
because they were easier, he found more difficult and some of the difficult things
seemed easy to him. His expressive signing was very, very poor - he used single
signs, no grammar. He had very good facial expression and used a lot of gesture,
again more gesture than you would expect a native signer to use, and also imitated a
lot of what people said to him. When you gave him a story to tell he actually got out
of his chair and acted it out. In conversation he would often look away; he couldn't
cope really with any more language. If you changed topic, he couldn't cope with that
and he would carry on talking. These were very unusual sort of patterns, so this is
what sparked our interest and made us think we were going to look at this more
broadly and we set about a UK study to see whether there were other cases like this
and to find out a little bit more about it. So in this study we sent questionnaires to
teachers and speech and language therapists in schools working with deaf children
who use sign language to see if there were any children causing cause for concern,
we had a check list of features they might identify, that made us think they were
children under performing, regardless of the sort of language input they got. So we
were looking for children who had impoverished English language, but children who
had a reasonable input but weren't doing well. We screened these children to make
sure any problems weren't down to verbal ability or motor skills and used
standardised BSL measures and then developed some new test to begin to
characterise the nature of these difficulties. We actually looked at research carried
out on spoken language SLI and the sorts of tests that we used there and tests
similar in BSL.
Kate? Kate?
KATE: Okay? Can everybody see me okay? Can you see my sign? Okay, for
people that are hearing I'm being voiced over.
Okay I wanted to talk about this new BSL test that we developed for SLI research.
Sorry, are we okay with the mics?
GARY: Can people hear at the back?
(Pause).
KATE: Can you hear now?
GARY: Thumbs up!
KATE: Okay, I will go back to where I started. We were talking about the new BSL
tests. Previous tests had been developed, but we wanted to look in more detail, in
more depth. There had been productive and receptive tests but we wanted to look at
grammar, et cetera, so we actually developed specific tests. So we had the
nonsense sign to test memory, so a sign would be made that wasn't BSL, not a
proper BSL sign, and we would see if the child could copy it. In spoken language,
they do a test with non‑words to see if the child can repeat the non‑words and if
they have SLI there they are poor at that, so we expected a similar result, that the
children with SLI would be not able to repeat.
So we would do a longer sentence as well and see whether or not they could repeat
that in the same way that they do the test with hearing children. And from the
research that has been done with spoken language, we would expect the similar sort
of results with deaf children reproducing sentences. We had vocabulary, definition
and again we would expect, as with hearing children, that it would be poor. Also
semantic fluency. What we would do is say: in one minute can you give us as many,
say, examples of food, different foods or different animals or different colours and
some children with spoken language SLI, that varies, so we expected a similar
result.
Okay, because they were new tests we needed to get normative data. We needed
to make sure that we had data to compare with. Obviously, it wasn't a big number,
but we needed to match for age and similarities in terms of school and so on. So the
deaf children with SLI, or potentially with SLI, we looked at their peers within the
school and did some comparisons, so that we could look at the children potentially
with SLI compared to their peers. Also, in terms of a similar background.
I think Ros has explained the phases. The initial phase with the 49 children, we had
sent out the questionnaire and altogether we assessed 30 children; 17 of whom we
felt had SLI. We also had 19 children in the control group so that gave us the
comparison.
Some of this is from tests that were developed previously, receptive and productive
tests. If we look at the second column ‑‑ sorry, the first column, verbal IQ, BAS. All
of them were within the normal range, so their language problems were not linked to
cognitive difficulties, it was something separate, a different problem. The third
column, which was BSL receptive, that's the orange cells there, and then the last
ones are productive and again you can see the orange that shows the children that
had the poor scores in productive.
We had two assessments. The first assessment we had already developed and
piloted but we needed more research from that in order to develop the second
assessment. So it was almost like a two‑step process. In the sign repetition tests,
the hearing children with SLI are very poor at repeating the individual words, so we
created a new test looking at the sign repetition. We had collected norms throughout
the UK and there were 40 signs in this which the children had to copy and that was a
test by Wolfgang Mann.
You can see from the chart behind me the light blue means that they were within the
norm on range. The red means poor. Different from spoken language, because
spoken language with nonsense words, most children are quite low, whereas with
BSL it was a little lower. I think the difference ‑‑ it was different from what we were
expecting before we started the research.
This was the second repetition. We had a range of different signs: some easier,
some more difficult. Again, the child had to watch and then when it was finished they
had to sign. That's the whole sentence, so as you see, the list here shows the
different scoring system that we used, giving points for the different aspects. The
maximum score for that was 90.
The dark columns there are the control group and the light are the SLI group, and
you can see very different scores, the control group being much higher than the SLI
group.
So this shows that the sentence repetition task may actually be a useful diagnostic
tool that we could use going forwards.
In the fluency task, which I described before, we gave the children one minute to be
able to think of all of the signs in a specific category. It didn't seem to be diagnostic
per se, although the children with suspected SLI did appear to start slower, so be
able to retrieve those words slower, but they caught up, as it were, by the end of that
minute.
So, what do our findings mean? Firstly, we have quite conclusive evidence that
there is SLI in sign language users and that some of the specific language
impairments are similar to what we find in hearing populations, but some of them are
different. For hearing populations, mostly with the repetition there were problems but
this didn't seem to be problematic for the deaf children in our groups. And that may
be, I suppose, a modality effect, when you are using speech sounds with many
syllables, that's something which we see in a speech stream or in spoken language,
but it is not something we see emulated in sign language or in that visual modality.
The sentence repetition task seems to be sensitive to predicted SLI or diagnosing
SLI and seems to be useful and the fluency task appears to identify some of the
difficulties children have, because they find it difficult to find the appropriate sign.
We are still actually analysing the data from the vocabulary task, so I won't be talking
about that any further here. This is just my last slide.
So thinking about what the implications might be for all of us. Some deaf children
who struggle to acquire sign language may be better ‑‑ it maybe better for them to
be in a strong sign language environment and this seems to be critically important for
people with SLI, so they have strong BSL role models, they have peers with whom
they can sign, and this can help develop their language fluency. If you have SLI
children within an unit where they don't necessarily have a strong language model,
they will struggle to acquire a first language because the language environment
won't suit their needs.
Similarly, if they have SLI, they will need to have specific interventions from speech
and language therapy. We know that many deaf children have speech and language
intervention, but if a child is diagnosed with SLI they will need much further
intervention than is often made and it is important that this child has the right support
through education, because this is something that will persist throughout their life.
So now that we have found that SLI does manifest in sign language users we need
to think about how we can have a good intervention. So now we know there is a
problem how do we improve their lives and their language skills? That is the next
question. Thank you very much for your attention.
[applause].
GARY: Okay, we have some time for some questions. Okay, we have a signing
question here, just hold on a sec.
SPEAKER: So you said 7 per cent of hearing children have SLI and in the statistics
for deaf children you said 17 of the 49 children had SLI, so does that mean you are
saying 35 per cent of deaf children have SLI? I wasn't sure on your figures, could
you just clarify that please?
KATE: That is a very good question. We found 6.4 per cent. So it is a similar
occurrence to what we see in hearing populations.
GARY: A quick response. Any questions? Right at the back there. Is it a signing
question? Oh speaking, okay.
SPEAKER: Hi. My question is, is there a link between deaf kids with SLI and
behaviour? Do the kids present at cams surgeries, et cetera? Was there any
indication during the research about that?
ROS: Shall I answer that one? Yes, that is a very good question, because we
certainly know that some hearing children with SLI do have behavioural problems
and our screening questionnaire did ask a little bit about that to do with particularly
distractibility and things like that, but we didn't really look at that in any more
scientific way and I think that is research still waiting to be done. Also I didn't also
mention our age group range was between 7 and 14 years so some of these
children, of course, may go on to have more social behavioural problems, but we
didn't investigate that in this study.
SPEAKER: I'm interested you started with 49 children. What about the other 32 that
were sort of picked out? What's going on with them? That seems to be an
interesting group, because clearly there is concern in some way about their
difficulties.
KATE: Some of the children were excluded because the school was worried about
their reading ability, and we were specifically looking at the sign language ability so
in the questionnaire responses that we got, that's what was highlighted and others of
the children who we tested, they did very well on the BSL receptive and productive
test and so we didn't see any problems with their language which is what we were
specifically trying to address so we felt that within our assessments they didn't
necessarily fit the focus of this specific study.
ROS: Can I just also add that in fact we only ruled one child out on motor difficulties
as we did have a test which looked at their motor skills because that could have
been a factor and also a very small number of children for cognitive reasons,
because their non‑verbal development was delayed and could have accounted for
the problems that they had. So that's how we managed to tease the group down.
And also there were a number of children, I should say, that we weren't able to get
permission to test, either from the families or someone else, so that's how we ended
up with that group.
SPEAKER: Hi, I just wondered if you could give us an example of some of sentence
repetition task items that you used? What kind of things were you asking the
children to repeat? ROS: Okay, I need to make sure I'm thinking of the appropriate
one. The easy one for the children was ‘girl right’ and then that was further
complexity to ‘the girl was walking outside, it rained, she got soaked’. So we start
with the shorter sentences which are simple and go to longer sentences with more
complex information. NEW SPEAKER: Hi, I just wanted to clarify how you
separated out those who had specific language impairment and those who did poorly
in the BSL test because they were poor in their sign language or poor parental sign
language - what was the screening process for making sure (inaudible) different
language impairment?
NEW SPEAKER: That's a very good question, many children
do get late exposure to sign language. That was a question we also asked as part of
the screening questionnaire we sent out. Some children we didn't carry on testing
because we felt their problems were because they had only had limited exposure.
One springs to mind who was 7, he only had a year of exposure, you clearly couldn't
say that was the cause of his problem at that stage. We asked parents to give us
information about children's language exposure. We looked to include children who
had access to BSL before the age of 5 and our control group were matched similarly.
On the whole they were also children with hearing families who had exposure to BSL
before the age of 5. GARY: I can see people are warming up now. I'm sorry but we
have to try and stick to the timetable. We are going to take a pause now. You've got
time to ask questions in the break. Can you come back at quarter to 12, please.
(Break)
GARY: We are ready to start again. So just as a little taster, we've got two more
presentations, brief presentations, before lunch and then after lunch it's your turn.
We've got question time, interaction, your view on things. So we are taking this in
turns, we are giving you some information now, but hopefully you are going to give
us back lots of information after lunch. We are thinking about food for thought,
thought for food at lunchtime. I'm going to pass over to Gabriella Vigliocco, who is
going to talk about how people learn sign language and how they understand sign
languages and this is really relevant for people who are perhaps learning sign
language as an adult or perhaps children in school who need to learn sign language.
Over to you Gabriella. GABRIELLA: Thank you, can you hear me okay? So first
of all I would like to thank Lilli for organising this because it's a great opportunity, also
for someone like me who used to work mostly with academics, to indeed see to what
extent what we are doing might have a relevance in the real world. So what I'm
going to do is of course after I have introduced the people with whom this work has
been done, that is the group I'm working with at DCAL, which includes some more
senior people like Dave Vinson, Robin Thompson and Pamela Perniss, who is here
today, and more junior people, Rob Skinner and Neil Fox, who is working with us
currently. What I would like to do is to talk about 2 aspects of language and
communication that are common between sign languages and what I would like to
do is to ask whether and to what extent we can learn something about spoken
language from sign language and to ask to what extent does the implications from
looking at sign language in the way we theorise about language, the way in which we
think about it, important issues like language revolution, language development and
how the brain processes language. I will do this focusing on these 2 areas.
The first one is iconicity, in terms of to what extent properties of a form, of a sign
language, of a word in spoken language and sentences do resemble, have some
visual link with properties of reference in the world, objects and actions in the world,
and then I'll look at integrating to articulators, the hands and the mouth in language
and what that tells us about sign language and what are the implications for the
spoken language. So starting from iconicity; now sign languages have plenty
of instances of iconicity, this is true in single signs and I'm giving you some examples
of the sign for camera, of the sign for eating and also for more somewhat abstract
domains like the sign for thinking in BSL and we see this across sign languages and
I'm also illustrating here some examples in ASL. Now it is usually believed and
usually argued that spoken language is iconicity challenged, but really that may not
be completely the case and in fact in languages we do have cases where we can -where the actual form of the word resembles the actual noise made by the animal for
example.
But turning some languages -- going with the languages we know best like English
and maybe Italian in my case -- but looking at Japanese for example there are more
transparent links between some properties of the linguistic form of the word and
some properties of the reference in the word and I'm giving you here the example for
one word in Japanese that seems to capture, if you look up the definition, a very
specific type of sensory sensation. In Japanese you have a very, very large
repertoire of words that have this more kind of sensory feel to it. But then there's
another fundamental property ‑‑ a couple of other fundamental properties of spoken
languages that appear to be a lot more iconic. These are the fact that people when
they speak they gesture as well and these oftentimes reflect the properties of what
they are talking about and also what is called in literature prosody which is the
musicality in the language, how is the information ‑‑ the envelope, the actual pattern
‑‑ that is there. That also may reflect more closely and more vividly aspects of the
visual experience, of the acoustic experience and so forth. So in a sense, although
this has been neglected, iconicity is there quite present in spoken languages too.
Nonetheless, because I regarded most theories of language has looked at spoken
languages only, these are phenomena that are less common in spoken language,
they are more clear in sign language.
Now, what we did in our work was then to begin to look at whether indeed ‑‑ so
there is iconicity across language: does it matter? Does it have an impact in
processing? Does it have an impact in development? Well, before I get to that, the
other thing that I wanted to mention is that there are elements of iconicity that of
course leaps along arbitrariness and it's not the case that in different languages you
would see the same word or the same sign for a given reference. So, for example,
Italian and English speakers use remarkably different onomatopoeic words to refer to
the animals up there and likewise, if you look across sign languages ‑‑ and here I
am illustrating it in ASL and BSL ‑‑ here you have the sign ‑‑ although iconic the
sign for "cat" is very different in those two languages as well, nonetheless it is iconic.
Now, how did we start looking at the processing? Well we looked in one experiment
I would like to present here at how fast the signers produce signs for given pictures.
So they were presented in this case very simply with a picture, they were asked to
keep their finger on a computer keyboard until they were ready to sign and then
produce the sign corresponding to the picture and we measured how long it was
taking them to produce the sign and the idea behind the study here is that signers
would have been faster at producing signs that were more iconic, where there was
more of this transparency for words that were more iconic. In the study we also
looked at people who started signing earlier and people who started signing later. In
the results that I will present, when I talk about iconicity, I will refer to ratings,
judgments, that native signers have provided us on a scale from 1 to 7 where one is,
it doesn't resemble any property of the reference at all, to 7 this implies, yes, it does
resemble a lot of properties of the objections and of the action. So the basic results
here ‑‑ well, first of all, the basic result with respect to iconicity is that what we did
observe is that signers were faster at producing iconic signs than non‑iconic signs.
So what we have here is that increasing how iconic the sign was, people were
actually faster in producing that sign. And that suggests that indeed it is somewhat
‑‑ there is something about iconicity that makes the sign easier to retrieve.
We further found that ‑‑ and probably intuitively, this is precisely what you would
expect ‑‑ that people who learn sign language, people who learn it as their native
language, were faster than people who learned BSL later. What is interesting,
however, is that iconicity facilitated, helped, for both groups. There was no
difference. It is not the case that only those who learn BSL later would show the
effect of iconicity or vice versa: both groups did.
So next what we asked this ‑‑ sorry, I'm going to skip through this slide because of
technical issues. Next, what we asked was, okay, we are seeing here that it seems
like to help a little bit the production, but is this a case that indeed has any impact on
development whatsoever and the way we asked this question is, well, if iconicity is
having an impact on language processing, well perhaps then what we should
observe is that children who are acquiring BSL as their native tongue, their native
language, they would learn iconic signs earlier than non‑iconic signs. In order to
address this question, what we did was to use really wonderful data that was
collected some time ago by a number of colleagues, some of whom are here, that
consisted of questionnaires that were given to parents and where parents were
asked to tick a box for a list of signs as to whether their children comprehended,
understood, those signs and produced those signs at different ages.
Here, I'm just giving you some examples of the signs that were included in there.
Now, what we would expect is that if, indeed, iconicity is playing a role in
development, as I said, then we should observe that children are understanding and
producing iconic signs earlier than less iconic signs. And here is the results for this
work. Let me walk you through. We have in the first graph corresponded to the
comprehension, understood signs, and the second one corresponds to production, to
produced signs, and what we are looking at is the proportion of signs that are
understood or comprehended depending upon the iconicity. What we found
particularly interesting is that indeed children tend to understand and produce iconic
signs earlier than non‑iconic ones and, moreover, there is a trend such that the
younger ‑‑ this is true especially for the older children, what we see here at "late",
which is the dotted line, which seemed to show more of an effect of iconicity. So
indeed we have that more iconic signs are understood and produced earlier than
non‑ iconic signs and this is particularly so for the older children.
Now, what are the overall implications of these results from our perspective? Well, I
mean, it seems like overall this data ‑ ‑ and we do have a number of other studies
that have looked at BSL as well as ASL ‑ ‑ indeed showed that iconicity makes
signs easier to produce and understand and to learn. One possible implication is
that indeed perhaps we could take more advantage of iconicity in the learning of both
sign languages and spoken languages as a L1 and L2 whereby for spoken
languages I believe the very critical implication is that we should look at these
aspects like the musicality and the gesture much more closely than what we have
done so far with respect to, indeed, whether these other aspects that have been
classified and considered as linguistic only may play a crucial role in processing and
may help both the development as well as the rehabilitation perhaps.
From my perspective, another fundamental implication of this work is that it forces us
to re‑ think our theories of language. It has been considered up until now that
arbitrariness, the fact that language and the word are only arbitrarily linked one to the
other has been considered a fundamental principle of language and the only
fundamental principle of language, but now perhaps what we see here is that we
came to this conclusion because we looked at some specific spoken languages.
Perhaps if we would have looked more broadly to other spoken languages as well as
sign languages, we would have seen that perhaps iconicity also may be considered
as a fundamental principle that may help in making language meaningful, in linking
language to our activities and to the world.
Okay, let me move now in my very little time remaining to the second area that I
would like to discuss today with you, which is the integration between two
articulators: the hand and the mouth in sign language and their implications.
So when we produce signs, what we do have is the hand pattern are combined with
English mouthings and I cannot show it because of technical difficulties, but when
signers are producing a sentence like this one, they would integrate the different
signs with producing on the mouth at different points aspects of the phonology of
English, which is a very interesting phenomena and sometimes it is necessary to
disambiguate what is being talked about but nonetheless it is being done all the
same.
So what we asked in this study is, what is the impact of this mouthing and, in
particular, to what extent they are part of the sign lexicon, they are an integral part of
the sign itself or to what extent they are in a sense showing us how signers are
bilinguals, they are bringing together their two languages, from one articulator, a
mouth and with the other articulator, a hand pattern. Now how do we go about trying
to investigate this issue? Well what we did was to get signers to slip, to make
mistakes, as we would do for speakers as well, when we want to see the processes
that are engaged in production. In particular, what we were very much interested
here was to see whether, when signers were making mistakes, so presented with a
picture of a flower, say, they would produce the sign for "free", whether the mistake
involved both the hand or the mouth, could involve only the mouth or could involve
only the hand, and the idea here was that if they always go together, the hand and
the mouth, well then it would appear that indeed that the hand and the mouth,
although the mouthing are English patterns, they are integrated with the manual
production within the mental representation for the sign. If no, well then mouthing
and hand pattern might be taken as simultaneous bilingual productions. Here I'm
presenting the critical results for this study. Let me walk you through because it's not
immediate how to look at this. So what we have here is what was produced in the
hand and what we have here is what was produced in the mouth in this experiment.
So what is critical is when there were errors, the same error in both hand and mouth,
and these are relatively few cases, if you look there are many more cases, 72 here,
where there was an error in the hand but no error in the mouth. Now, even more
striking is that well these errors were really, really few. Yes, of course, all language
producers are very skilled and these errors, although we design experiments that try
to induce them, occur only rarely, so that in fact for the vast majority of cases people
were just correct across the board. Of course there were also a very large number
of cases in which the manual pattern was not accompanied by mouthing, which may
well be just because the test was actually remarkably boring. What is critical here is
that they don't go together. It's not the case that when there is an error on the hand
there is an error on the mouth. So it seemed to be clearly suggesting that what
signers are doing is that they are combining their 2 languages, the English on the
mouth and BSL on the hand. So indeed they reflect bilingual production rather than
being an integral part of the sign and then indeed I guess one implication of this
finding is that learning BSL in childhood does not interfere with learning English; they
are independent. Okay so I'm going to stop here and I just want to thank you for
listening to my presentation. Thank you. (Applause) GARY: I just want to
emphasise, that trying to do this for Gabriella is like running a marathon, there is lots
and lots of information that Gabriella has got across to you in a few minutes. I want
to congratulate you, you did a great job. I'll open the floor for questions. Any
questions, clarifications? NEW SPEAKER: I have read somewhere that you if you
get a group of speakers together and they speak different languages it's going to
take a lot longer for them to come up with a kind of inter language, whereas if it was
2 groups of signers with very different languages they would take something like 3
days to come up with some kind of inter language. I'm wondering if the process they
go through is grouped to this. GABRIELLA: Very interesting, very nice question.
Deaf people are much more common of poor signing, more used to having to cope
with communication in a variety of ways in the sense they are recruiting their thinking
abilities in a different way than speakers who would be in a sense more fixed on
what their language should be. An example of this, the speakers take some time to
adjust to people who have a different accent in a way that I don't think would be the
case for signers. I think signers have the ability to adjust more quickly. Now, you
may wonder to what extent is this related to their bilingual status, as bilinguals
perhaps are more used to having to deal with different languages and so this helps
in the adaptability. That's what they have to cope with on a daily basis or to what
extent iconicity may play a role in this. You may ask, well if we were to look at
Japanese and Korean people where both languages have a lot more in terms of
onomatopoeia and words that more sound symbolic, more iconic, then perhaps for
them it would be easier, but it's a great question. NEW SPEAKER: There is a
question right at the back. NEW SPEAKER: Forgive me if I missed this detail,
your definition of iconicity. A lot of people talk about iconical not iconic, it's disputed a
little bit, some things seem iconic and as you become more fluent (inaudible) things
might not be, signs like this for monkey is interesting because no-one has ever seen
a monkey do this, do you know what I mean? Define iconicity. NEW SPEAKER:
What we have been using so far is a rather intuitive notion of iconicity, related to
native signers, what they see as more or less iconic on a scale. The first answer to
your question is even this is not so agreeable. If you want a measure of iconicity, the
fact that it's not one or nothing, it's already improving on the idea. It's not the case
obviously that signs or words can be fully iconic or not iconic at all. In the spoken
domain people have been looking at different types of consonants as related to spiky
or more rounded, so that's a very subtle type of iconicity which you might be able to
capture more given a scale, a rating, that is not all or nothing. So this is where we
stand right now. It's not very scientific, not very precise, but it gives us already some
insight, well at least it's a phenomenon worth studying across languages and then to
what extent we might one day link properties of signs, words and visual, actual visual
properties of stimuli, it's for the future. GARY: We've got time for one short
question and one short answer. The person over that way.
NEW SPEAKER: I was
just wondering, when you talk about iconic signs, that people had a quicker reaction
time when they were signing something that was iconic. Do you have any data
where if you have any -- when people reach older age issues, like Alzheimer's or
senility, are they able to react to iconic signs quicker than those who speak? NEW
SPEAKER: We don't know. There is some data by Jo Atkinson, right here, who has
shown that not necessarily iconic signs in one patient are produced more easily than
non iconic signs. But to what extent these results generalise, to what extent there
are conditions that clearly implies iconicity is not playing a role any more because all
that iconicity does is to make a stronger link between meaning and form, but if this
link is broken you cannot do very much. GARY: Thank you Gabriella. (Applause)
NEW SPEAKER: Thank you everybody. This is the last presentation of the
morning. I'll be presenting with my colleague, talking about language repetition task
and age effect and then she will hand over to me and I'll be talking about children's
language, cognition and delayed abilities. Thank you very much. NEW
SPEAKER: Thank you. I just want to clarify we are not necessarily talking about
repetition today, we are talking about judgment and I will explain that. First of all I
think it's important to think about why the early learning of a language is important.
We've already talked about this earlier this morning so again I'm going to be covering
some of the same issues. We know how hearing children develop, they learn their
language primarily from the family they grow up in, but for deaf children the situation
is different. As Ros said earlier this morning, we know that only 5 per cent of deaf
children are born into a deaf family who have sign language as their main form of
communication, so it's a very small amount. The rest are from hearing families.
Their sign language acquisition is similar to those of a hearing person, it's the same
process. Deaf children with deaf families, their progress is the same as hearing
children in hearing families - a very small number of deaf children. The remaining 95
per cent of deaf children, they are born into hearing families, most of whom use sign
language. So for those children the acquisition of language could start earlier in life,
later in life and realistically sometimes never and it very much depends on what their
exposure is to other deaf people who do sign. We know that the later a child learns
a language that can have a dramatic effect, so we want to look into that and that
affects many, many children. So we were trying to develop this task, the idea
was to test understanding and the fact of the age of the acquisition of language. So
we asked deaf people if they could watch a signed sentence and judge if that was a
possible sentence in BSL or something impossible in BSL. I'll give you an example.
Actually this will test if you are paying attention, so have a look. This should be
familiar because we had this example shown earlier by Gabriella. So we've got 2
different BSL orders of the sentence, number 1 at the top and number 2 below. Only
one is possible in BSL, so which is it, 1 or 2? Correct. Very good. So only one of
those structures is possible in BSL. So we created 120 of these sentences and they
were presented in a video format and asked people to watch them and to judge
which of them were possible or impossible. It wasn't a question of deciding about
whether it was between 1 and 2, there were different orders presented. Actually the
statistics are a little bit complicated, but one thing is very clear, deaf children from
deaf families performed better in this task compared to those who were deaf people
from hearing families, and I'm talking about deaf adults for a moment. So what you
see in the graph, at the bottom you have the age they acquired BSL, so starting at
zero, which is basically those children born deaf to deaf families, where they are
exposed from zero. If we go from zero to 8 the accuracy goes down the later the
BSL is applied. So that was one very clear finding, that the age of acquisition does
have an affect. So what does this mean? Well it's one study and there have
been a number of other studies that have had the same result and there have been a
number of studies into American sign language and the findings were similar. We are
starting the same findings in BSL. Where is Mairead - some of her research is
starting to find these similar cases for BSL. The difference between those born into
deaf families and those born into hearing families supports this idea that there is this
critical period, sensitive period of language acquisition, and when that needs to
happen and it should be as early as possible. So this evidence from the deaf adults
and the research that we did with them, means that deaf children need to be learning
sign language as early as possible in terms of the effects. Sometimes people think
with a deaf child, "oh let's wait and see if they acquire spoken language and then we
will introduce sign language later". The problem with that is, if you wait it actually
might be too late and there is a risk there that you are denying the child access to a
language in the early stages. They need to have an accessible language as early as
possible in their life.
So this is really I'm talking about a linguistic effect and I'm now going to hand over to
Gary who is going to talk about how that affects a child in terms of the cognitive
skills.
GARY: So, we've already had a presentation from Kate Rowley this morning who
talked about the repetition of a nonsense sign, which hopefully you can all
remember. But some of you may not know why that is important. Well, when
children learn a spoken or signed language, they have to be able to see or hear a
word, bring it into their system, work out what that word means. So, for example, if
the child sees a sign like this (indicates) "dog" or they see "rabbit" or they see "pig",
they have to work out how do they know what that means. So they have to have that
repeated somewhere in their cognitive system and then relate that sound or that sign
to the animal, and they make that connection in their head.
So when you are learning vocabulary, it is important that you do it well and it is a
very important skill in life. It is the way that you understand the world, it is a way that
you understand other people, you know what they are thinking, and it's also the way
we access education, you need to know what words are, we need to understand
what those words are, to be able to learn things.
So we decided to create a test which we could administer to deaf children, we were
giving them a new sign, something which we knew they had never seen before, and
the reason we knew they had never seen it before is because we created them, they
weren't actually signs that existed, and we asked those children to watch the screen
where they were seeing the sign and then try and remember what that sign was and
when the screen faded to black, to repeat the sign that they had seen. Then we
filmed them and we looked at the mistakes that they made and that showed us how
they started to process that vocabulary and what was happening in their brain when
they were trying to repeat the sign that they had seen.
This is a test which is very similar to normal language development: every day you
hear new words, you see new signs, and you have to retain them and remember
how you can then reproduce them and the better you are able to do that, the better
you are able to develop your language. If there is some problem with your mental
system and you are forgetting them, then it makes a ‑ ‑ it is difficult for you to then
understand the world that you live in.
So this is an example of one of our nonsense signs that we created. So what did we
find?
Looking at deaf children, at the age of 4 they made quite a lot of mistakes or errors:
they would drop things, they would repeat the wrong aspect of a sign, they would
confuse the order that things should happen in. So about 40 per cent of what they
did were mistakes. By the age of 7 they had improved and by the age of 10 they
were a lot better, as one would expect. If you remember earlier, Mairead talked
about correlations and this skill seems to be correlated with grammatical ability so if
you are good at grammar and how bits of language are related to each other, this
seems to be related to vocabulary. So these are different areas of language skills
that are related to each other. Good grammar correlated to the repetition of these
nonsense signs.
It also correlated with motor ability. We tested them again with bead threading, so
threading beads onto a string, and if the children were able to do that quickly they
were better able to repeat their nonsense signs. So this again seemed to be related
to sign language learning ability.
The next part of our story was that we wanted to look at cognition and that's what I
will focus on now. So if you imagine you are at home and your daughter says, "oh
I've finished making a really lovely cake", so obviously that tempts your appetite. If
somebody was watching as we can see there that boy is looking at the cake from his
computer going "yum". Now I have a sad story to tell you. Your daughter was lying.
She definitely made a cake, it just wasn't edible. So that is an interesting problem
because the daughter needs to think about your thinking. When she is saying "I've
made a cake", she needs to be able to think about cognitively that she is using the
word "cake" in a metaphorical sense and that you may understand that. What about
this little boy? How do you get into his thinking world? Would he understand when
you used the word "cake" that you mean something which is inedible, do you think
he would understand that in that interaction? Most people are saying no in the
audience. So they haven't yet developed that way of thinking about other people's
thought worlds.
When psychologists were trying to test this ability, this able to think about somebody
else's world, they used this, this experiment, which is an explicit false belief task.
One of the problems with this test which has been noted in the literature is that there
is language in the test, there is quite a lot of language to explain the test, you have to
explain the story, the children have to explain the words, the sentences, and lots of
things. So we wanted to create a test which was suitable for very young children,
deaf children, and we also wanted to make it language‑ independent, so we were
testing their cognitive skills rather than their language ability in understanding the
task.
There has been quite a lot of research within psychology which states that if you
show pictures to mothers normally, and you explain the picture and you ask them to
explain the picture to their baby who is one, two or three years old, about Father
Christmas and thinking about what this girl would want for Christmas, you can
actually see how the mother presents that information to their children, you can look
at that language.
Specifically thinking about how you go into somebody else's thought world, how you
can predict what people will be ‑ ‑ what your children will be able to understand, so
in that mother talk, or mother‑ ese, if the mother is using lots of things like "think",
words like: think, no, remember, know, don't know, understand, dream, wonder and
these kinds of cognitive words in relation to thought, then the children quickly
develop that kind of ability to empathise with other people and they understand that
other people in the world have a different experience to them. But if the mother talks
about physical things like, "oh he is chubby in a red suit and he has a beard and has
a hood", although that is interesting it doesn't seem to enable the children to develop
this ability to think of somebody else's thought world. It is not predictive of that.
So we wanted to create a new test to explore this phenomena, that something that
would be suitable for two year old children, so this used ‑ ‑ we were able to use an
eye tracking device, which actually looked at where the 2‑ year old children were
looking when we showed them this stimuli.
So in this video you see a mouse and it either hides in the yellow box or the red box.
Then in the next scene, you see the cat and it either sees where the mouse has
gone or it doesn't see where the mouse has gone. So if the cat then sees that the
mouse is in the yellow box the cat then disappears from the scene and then that
pesky little mouse goes to the red box, so you know that the mouse is in the red box,
but we know that because the cat isn't there the cat doesn't know that the mouse is
in the red box. So then we see the cat entering the scene again and you are
interested to know whether you can predict where the cat will go. If the child
understands that, because the cat has disappeared, the cat will not have seen that
the mouse has moved and they will know that the cat will go to the yellow box. It
means that that child will tend to look at the yellow box because that's where they
expect the cat to go.
If, however, the child looks at the red box, it means that they are not able to climb
into the thought world of the cat, because they haven't realised that the cat is not
there, so they don't know what the child knows themselves. So with this task they
are exploring this idea of the children being able to understand other people's
thought worlds, but we are not using any language. So in that way we are able to
just look at that cognitive skill, rather than it be a language‑ dependent test.
When we first started researching this, I thought, "well, it may be that deaf children
will have a problem with meta language, with the cake story, that kind of thing", if you
are from a hearing family you are quite good at developing this whereas if not it is
not so good but with this task we should be able to capture whether it is possible for
deaf children to do this or not.
I was really shocked to find this result, which was that deaf children of the age of 2
from hearing families were not able to go into the thought world of the cat at all. At
the age of 2. So already that seems to be identifying an early cognitive problem. So
I was then interested, we know as I have said before, if a mother uses lots of
cognitive words like "think, know, remember", then that can facilitate a 2‑ year old
child being able to understand other people's thought worlds. So I was interested in
the type of language that the deaf children were exposed to. The dark columns are
hearing mothers using spoken language with their hearing babies, so lots of words
which are about think, know, for example, you can see in this column here.
Hearing mothers with deaf babies, however, change their language. They don't tend
to use these types of words, these reflective words or cognitive words, they tend to
describe physical attributes. So the red coat of Santa Claus, for example.
So it seems that parents really need to ‑ ‑ what I was interested in was where do
parents gain information about how they should interact with their child? Do they
read about that? Do they learn about that? Who tells them how they should
communicate with their kids? That is an open question which I'm kind of throwing
over to you, but I think I'm out of time so I will stop there.
[applause].
GARY: I think we have time for 2 questions, maybe one for Kearsy and one for me or
we can hold those questions for later, after lunch, you will have time for interaction.
Any thoughts? NEW SPEAKER: If a child's deaf and the parents are hearing, if
the child has information from school, about thinking about other people, how can we
achieve that? How can we benefit the parents in that way? GARY: I think that
happens quite a lot. It may be that there is quite a lot of information that is clearly
explained at school, but communication is more problematic at home. So if you are
learning something at school then most people want to have the opportunity to
practice talking about that at home and that's how you really solidify what you've
learnt at school. If you are not having that reinforced at home often you will forget
that and we know often when kids come back to school after 6 weeks holiday they
have forgotten what they learnt last time, so you have to start that thinking process
again. That's a good point. NEW SPEAKER: Looking at the results you've got
there, you've got deaf children of hearing parents and hearing children with hearing
parents. What about deaf with deaf parents, where are the statistics for those?
GARY: We haven't carried out research on deaf with deaf yet. We know that deaf
from deaf families at the age of 5 do have this ability to go into other people's thought
worlds, that's not a problem for deaf and deaf families, but we know that it's more
problematic for deaf children from hearing families. So one of the reasons why we
haven't actually looked at the population of deaf from deaf families is because it's
quite hard to actually find participants at the age of 2, from a deaf family, so at the
moment we've collected the data which is easier and also where we know there may
be a problem, but in the future we would like to collect some comparative data. I think I'll hand over to Lilli. LILLI: So we've had all these presentations this
morning. You've got all the information about what research has taken place and
this afternoon is your opportunity to talk about whether deaf children and education
and the experience has improved. We know it hasn't. We need to think about the
future and we need your feedback, we want lots of questions from you, maybe you
can talk about your own research or own experience, so please do ask questions. In
terms of networking, we want to encourage you to do that, you have your name
badges and if you look behind the email addresses are in there, you don't need to
write them down. Please use that opportunity to network. There are 5 interpreters
present this afternoon, please grab one if you need one for any communication
reasons. Just to let you know we do have Wi-Fi available and the passwords are up
on the wall, so if you do want to twitter or blog about the event and tell people what
your thoughts are so far then do. So during lunch I hope that you will be thinking
about the questions and ideas that you may have for future research. I look forward
to your questions. We are back at 2 ready for our panel discussion, each of which
will have some very interesting and different views and will be fascinating. Those of
you who are part of the panel could you actually come down here and we'll have a
brief meeting. Everyone else enjoy your lunch.
(Lunch break) GARY: Good afternoon, I hope you had lots of food and lots of thought and we are
going to start off this afternoon with question time and we are very lucky to have a
chair, they are not in the Dimbleby family, I'm sorry, but we are very fortunate to have
Simonetta Agnello-Hornby. If Shakespeare were here he would say she is a woman
of many parts. She is a lawyer, Anglo Italian, has worked for many years in Brixton
in London and has worked a lot, when I say a lot, I mean she has had a big impact in
the human rights of children around the world. She has pushed for different aspects
to be put into European and World law, conventions on human rights and she has
many deaf connections, which she will maybe explain later on at coffee. She is
going to look after us this afternoon. Now I'm going to pass over to Simonetta and
she is going to introduce all of the panel members. SIMONETTA: Thank you very
much for inviting me and it is so wonderful to see so many. We have questions
already to ask and we have a wonderful panel so I shall be quick. As any chair that
is good, I should say very little about me. The only thing I will tell you is that my
cousin was deaf, she is now dead, she would have been 90. Italian deaf language is
completely different, that's another thing that separates and unites people in the
world. We have to think of that as well, particularly with immigrants who may know
how to read people here, but may not be able to know how to read and understand
people back home, but what you are doing in England is fantastic. I have a deaf
client and I have learnt how to communicate with her somehow. For all my sins I did
2 bicycle rides for the Deaf Children's Society, the first day I rode the saddle the
wrong way, to this day I have never forgotten it. That's why I'm here, thank you.
Now I will introduce the members of the panel, which is incredibly impressive and I
shall ask each of them if they could wave to identify themselves and, in my fantastic
organisation, I can't find the paper. Ian Noon. You know who he is. He works at the
ministry of -- I have lost you. Oh here we are, Ian he works at the National Deaf
Children's Society on policy issues, an active campaigner for deaf children's issues,
politics, family, education provisions. Dr Hilary Sutherland, you do know about her,
she is a deaf academic and researcher and focuses on research about development
and bilingualism. Robin Ash is not here. Katherine(?) is here, you know her, she's a
manager of the Children and Family Services and she has a tremendous amount of
experience in working with children and families. Dr Archbold, Sue Archbold doctors in Italy never have a name, just the surname. Dr Sue Archbold, director of
the Ear Foundation is interested in how to best use and manage cochlear implants.
Gwen Carr. She worked for many years as a Teacher of the Deaf and is deputy
director of the Newborn Screening Programme and Brigitte McWhinney, last but not
least, she works in interpreting and media and I would give a big applause to the
panel for coming and being here. Now we start with the questions. The questions
have been carefully made and the person who is going to make it will stand up and
give it and then it will be read by me again, I think, and translated. GARY: Our first
question. MARK NELSON: I can see there are a lot of people here. Okay, let's
see where my voice is coming from. There’s about 15 years experience and
research and academia going on, but when it comes to education for the deaf it
doesn't seem to have been improving over the last years, what do you see we need
to do to improve the quality of education for deaf children? SIMONETTA:
Excellent question. This is a fundamental question, profound. It will be the first but I
would like it to be also the last at the end of the contribution of all the persons on the
panel or some of them, now I will start with Ian Noon. IAN NOON: I think I'm
speaking with my campaigns hat on and I think part of the answer has to be about
money, I think initially there has been a lack of investment in specialist educational
support services for deaf children. There's something called the Consortium for
Research Into Deaf Education, or CRIDE, and they do an annual survey and last
year they found that at least 18 services teachers of the deaf were working on
average with around 80 deaf children each and in a worst case scenario they deal
with about 140. In some areas it is 140 children. And it's really hard to believe that
in those areas deaf children are getting the help that they need. And of course with
all the spending cuts happening right now I think our big worry is that a bad situation
is going to get worse. Which is why at NDCS we've launched our saving futures
campaign and we are trying to highlight that as an issue.
But unfortunately it's not just about money, it's about how you spend it. I think one of
the things I'm really interested in is whether funding is being invested properly in the
early years. We know that newborn hearing screening programmes were rolled out
about six years ago, we know that there has been a fair amount of research about
what support is meant to happen and yet we still know that too many deaf children
are starting school without age appropriate language. So what's going on? Is the
help wrong or is it not being applied properly or is the right support being given but
not enough of it or is it something else that we don't really understand? I think trying
to work out what's happening in the early years needs to be a priority, I think, for me,
for future research and deaf education.
[applause].
NEW SPEAKER: Thank you very much.
I think I would like to hear also from Katherine please.
SPEAKER: Okay, the BDA have two campaigns, one is about bilingual education for
deaf children which is in BSL and English. The other thing the BDA wants to do is to
continue to make sure that bilingual education can continue to develop through deaf
professionals and hearing professionals working in collaboration together with those
deaf children and with the educators to make sure that education is of a high
standard. If that doesn't happen the level will remain as the plateau it is at and it
needs to continue to develop.
SPEAKER: I thought of two speakers but I would like other members of the panel to
answer if they want to, and give their own side of their own profession.
SPEAKER: I think what you said in your question was really important and the
answer is, we don't know how deaf children are doing really. There are a lot of
teachers of the deaf in this audience who would say: I know many deaf children who
are doing fantastically well. I know many deaf children who are doing fantastically
well and I'm sure others do. Equally, we know of many deaf children who continue to
under‑ achieve. I think two things: we have to be more honest and open about
evidence and I'm saying that really to teachers of the deaf, who quite often don't feel
comfortable in talking about their children's outcomes and being really honest and
until we are properly open and honest and then we can look at what is it that helps
deaf children do well? What are the circumstances in which deaf children thrive
educationally, but also socially and emotionally because that is part of your
education as well, and begin to identify what works, for whom and when. Because
deaf children are different. I use the term "deaf" obviously fed through from my
NDCS background to mean that full spectrum of hearing level and different children
may need different things. Different children thrive with different inputs. And we
need to work with researchers to honestly look at what are the things that work for
deaf children and families in what circumstances. So I would make a plea for more
evidence to come from the field and really address what the needs are, rather than
saying that one‑ size‑ fits‑ all.
[applause].
SPEAKER: I think that's an excellent question. And it is not possible, I think, as I
said previously, there is not one‑ size‑ fits‑ all and there is not one answer that is
going to answer the question, but something that is undeniable is that it is important
to have a deaf community involved more, that deaf education historically has always
put deaf people to the side, not had them involved, and deaf children historically and
still today do not know that there are deaf adults in the world. They don't know that
these things are happening and deaf children then don't know that if we have deaf
adults around more then we are going to see that, there is going to be more
collaboration and in addition to that, I think there needs to be a big attitude change.
Within deaf education I think we need to focus not on the ears and audiology, and I
think that is what it has been, I think maybe audiology ‑ ‑ I think within itself it is
worthwhile and valuable, but it should not have anything to do with deaf education
and unfortunately it has become merged together. For a lot of deaf people they were
trained ‑ ‑ teachers of the deaf, sorry, have been trained how to use audiological
equipment and what to do and they become qualified teachers of the deaf but they
can't communicate with deaf children and I don't understand that. I think focusing on
the ear a lot less ‑ ‑ I mean I have four children and my youngest child does use
hearing aids so I'm not saying throw away the hearing aids, don't use audiological
happen, I'm not saying that but I'm saying within education there shouldn't be such a
focus on what hearing is and ‑ ‑ [applause]
NEW SPEAKER: Thank you very much, Brigette, for what you say and also I have
learned something else that the French speak so fast that the interpreters had
difficulty but they did it but I couldn't at one stage but that is my fault because I don't
know your language and I should have learned it. But thank you very much indeed.
I wonder what an Italian would have done. [laughter].
SPEAKER: Okay, I don't know if you can see me signing, shall I stand? No, okay.
So my question I guess in response to what Mark has said, I think there needs to be
a better collaboration. Historically, I think the same question has come up time and
time again, but what we are missing out on is training for deaf people to become
educators and I think that's really appropriate, and even this morning when we were
talking about issues to do with linguistics and, you know, in regards to access and
intervention, I mean why aren't deaf people working in training in those areas?
Having teachers of the deaf who are hearing, they grow up with their own life
experience, but when you have a teacher of the deaf who has grown up deaf and
who can understand the deaf experience, that's going to make a whole different
framework for the teacher who is working with the deaf children and I think that's
really important. I do think there needs to be more research in regards to that, to see
how we can make education better for deaf children, particularly in regards to the
issue of learning English, I think that is really important in teaching deaf people
English. For me personally I struggled with that and I have a PhD and yet I still
struggle with English and so I think that is imperative and I think we need to be able
to find a way how to pass that learning over to deaf children so that they can learn.
[applause].
SPEAKER: Thank you. I will be brief because much of what I want to say has been
said by other members of the team. I would just like to say that although I was
introduced with my cochlear implant hat on, as a teacher of the deaf for many years
including before the advent of implants I would like to say I think this is one of the
most important questions about deaf education and I would defend the right for every
deaf child, as Gwen said, at whatever level of deafness, let's not forget the diversity
of deafness, and the diversity of the deaf experience and the diversity of children and
their families, and the right for them to have the best and most appropriate
education. So, as Gwen said, we cannot put them in a box, people say to me: what
sort of education does a child with a cochlear implant need? How do I know? It isn't
one‑ size‑ fits‑ all. There is such a diversity and as Gwen has said there has been a
lot of rhetoric about deaf education and it has got in the way of us providing an
evidence base, of us providing and developing proper assessments for children so
that we know what each individual needs and then we might be able to provide it.
So thank you for the question, and I will stop there because I don't want to repeat
what other people have said. Thank you.
[applause].
SPEAKER: Now, there is question number two, which is to be read by Enid Hitton.
Enid, there you are.
GARY: Enid where are you? Catch!
SPEAKER: What are the issues of bilingualism in deaf education with regards to
deaf babies acquiring their first language?
SPEAKER: If the interpreters forget to give me the thumbs up, it will go very quiet!
That is a very profound and difficult question and I'm going to ask Hilary Sutherland
to start the answers.
SPEAKER: I think there's two issues here. One is for the child's acquiring of the
language, and one is also in providing a language‑ rich environment and I think the
issue is how to provide that. We know that a lot of ‑ ‑ most deaf children born to
hearing families where they are not using sign language in the home so the parents
then have to learn BSL and to become confident in using that. At the same time that
that may be going on, there's learning going on for the child, there's playing, there is
learning some single signs and I think learning to make mistakes and all of those
things, that helps a child to learn grammar. Now, for hearing children, they may say
words, pick up information, hear that they might have said something wrong, pick it
up incidentally, all that sort of thing will affect and help their speech. With a deaf
child with hearing families, when they are learning their behaviour, they are learning
all the language, sometimes the first time that they are going to learn any signs at all,
the parents might at that point intervene and so what it means is that they are not
making normal grammatical errors as a hearing child would. Now, when you have a
deaf child from a deaf family, for example, they are going to have that normal
interaction as a hearing child with hearing parents would, where they make mistakes,
learn what they are doing and they are watching other people develop. So it is that
kind of intervention that affects natural development. Now, when the hearing parents
are learning sign language, I mean that's fantastic, but if they are learning at the
same time, almost at the same pace as the child, in a way that's unhelpful and they
should be, as any other parent, in advance of the child, so that they can emulate the
appropriate use of language. So, for example, you may have a child that say, you
know, "mummy, look there is a car" or "mummy, look there is a cow" and the mother
might then say "oh don't worry we are nearly there" and they are at cross‑ purposes
because the mother doesn't have the rich availability of language which is what a
parent should have so that their child can learn from that. I think that that can be
complicated and I think we have to accept that that is the case, but a lot of, you
know, children will say, "oh you know, my parents, they try to sign, bless them" and
there will be others who say "oh my parents are really good at signing", but what it
does mean is that for that deaf child, it is important to them that their parents have
learned sign language because it means that you are valuable to them and they
want to learn your language, and what I think is important is how we are working
together so that the parents are working together and seeing what the difficulties are,
understanding each other and dealing with those roles.
SIMONETTA: Now I shall ask Brigitte to be slower and shorter. BRIGITTE:
Okay, I think bilingualism is a difficult dynamic anyway. For me, I have been quite
lucky as I have grown up in a deaf environment so I don't have to think about these
things, it just happens quite naturally for me. I now have deaf children and for me
that's natural, but I appreciate for hearing parents who have a deaf child there does
need to be encouragement, something provided, something introduced like
communication. It doesn't mean necessarily they will know about SL from the day
the child is born, but allowing them the right environment where no-one is saying you
must do this and you must do the other, because what's really important, and as a
mother myself I appreciate that as parents you know communication is important,
that rapport with your child is important and you are already dealing with a stigma.
From the child's perspective -- I'll say it in English, effortless. Language acquisition
needs to be effortless for a deaf child. I'll carry on in English sorry. My mind is a little
bit complicated, but what I'm thinking is crucial for a deaf child's perspective is to be
able to be in a good environment full of communication and for hearing parents to be
encouraged by professionals to embrace the visual, it doesn't have to be from day 1
BSL; it can just be embracing actually their family, becoming a deaf family, if one
member of the family is deaf then the family is deaf. SIMONETTA: Now I wonder
if any others want to contribute, if they feel that they don't have to please feel you
don't have to. NEW SPEAKER: I think it's pretty outrageous that in some places
the families need to learn sign language to be able to communicate with their child,
costing hundreds of thousands of pounds. It’s disappointing from a campaigns point
of view that the Government recognises this problem but won't do anything about it.
NEW SPEAKER: I wasn't going to say anything because I think Hilary and Brigitte
said it very eloquently, but just to go back to what you said, it's about babies and we
have now tiny babies with parents, hearing parents as well as deaf parents, who
obviously know their tiny baby is deaf at 4 to 6 weeks old. We don't expect when we
have a hearing baby for that hearing baby to be wonderful in our expression with
them. Many hearing parents struggle to think about how to communicate with their
hearing baby. As professionals giving advice we should be saying maximise the
auditory environment, but I couldn't agree more about maximising the visual
environment because who knows which direction that baby will take later. If you
really are thinking bilingualism you want every opportunity for the visual skills in that
visual environment to develop as well as any auditory skills you might be focusing
on. For me that's where having access to a range of deaf adults can help you
maximise your story telling, your play and all sorts of things in that environment.
Even if your child goes on to be oral or have implants, but give every possible
chance to maximise those visual skills that will underpin bilingualism from the
beginning, back both and ride both. SIMONETTA: Any more contributions?
NEW SPEAKER: Just very quickly, communication is essentially auditory visual
and the early communication skills within a relaxed family environment are hugely
important. That's a fundamental way in which the baby and family develops self
esteem and self esteem is the most important thing you can give a child, that's
rooted in the first few days and weeks and months, so those early days of good
communication are hugely important. It's about the family feeling comfortable and
relaxed about that, dare I say it, whatever professionals tell them to do. NEW
SPEAKER: Could I make one last point. The BBA has seen that deaf children's
education has declined, deaf schools are closing down, opportunities for children to
be exposed to sign language are limited. The issue of education has a lot to do with,
I guess, deaf children and hearing children. For those that receive BSL from birth it
seems to be fine, but what we do need to remember is the parents themselves, both
deaf and non hearing parents, should have opportunities to teach BSL with their deaf
children as well so that together their communication can improve. We've seen that
on the international field as well, we've heard of parents who use sign language to
their hearing children, we know that's happening. Why isn't that happening with deaf
children as well? We need to be thinking about that and making sure there is
education and that will continue. Can I add one more thing?
NEW SPEAKER: I just wanted to say that there has never been a case, I don't think,
of a deaf child suffering bad consequences from having sign language when young,
but we have seen cases of deaf children suffering in adulthood by sort of failed oral
education, for example by being too focused on that. So I think that there is
something to be learnt here. It's question number 3 now. Sophie Roberts. Can I
just say something? I wonder if somebody could write the names of the persons on
the panel so that we have the names of the speakers when it comes up there.
NEW SPEAKER: Another big question - what has been the impact of cochlear
implantation on deaf children's lives up until now? NEW SPEAKER: I would say
that deaf children with cochlear implants rightly or wrongly are one of the most
researched groups of children that there has ever been, because of the challenges
of introducing cochlear implantation for this country or any country, but quite rightly
because we do need an evidence based and quite rightly the introduction was
challenged, one of the big problems about cochlear implantation having been
introduced in clinical settings, medical models, is the great danger as seeing deaf
children as a pair of ears on legs, not in a holistic sense. One of the advantages was
that a lot of research was carried out and very tight research because I learnt as a
Teacher of the Deaf in medical situations the research is ongoing, typed and
evidence based, so that was there from the beginning. Another problem about it is
that much of that research is not published in journals that are accessible to
Teachers of the Deaf, to psychologists, often being published in medical journals,
audiological journals and it seems to me we need researchers in all of them working
much more closely together so that we actually then can get a holistic picture of how
these children are doing. I think that is happening. I don't see it much in the UK, but
I see it in Scandinavia and in the USA. They are working closely with Linguists,
psychologists and so on, looking at the outcomes, so a very brief summary about
what I think we know, but there is an awful lot of course that we don't know. We do
know 200,000 children world-wide have cochlear implants now. We do know
children with cochlear implants can now hear spoken language at very quiet levels
right across the speech frequency range. What they do with that is dependent of
course on a huge number of other issues, some of which have been touched on
already. We do know they are developing communication skills and early language
skills, it couldn't be on a par with normal hearing children. We do know that their
reading levels are improved compared with matched groups in the past, but - there is
always a but in life - when you come to it, we do know that reading for them, for
example, and educational issues are more complex as we get to secondary schools
where acoustic conditions are dreadful, we have changes of teachers and there are
complex structures, so nothing is straight forward. Apart from the fact that we've had
a lot of quantitative research going on, which actually bears a huge scrutiny, as
many people like Harry (inaudible) from Holland who has done so much research
suggests, and he also suggests bilingualism could learn from some of the rigour of
the research. We do know there is now a lot of qualitative research going on. We've
got a big group world wide with people who have grown up with cochlear implants,
who know what the experience is like, they have the diversity of experience and at
last we've done studies with the National Deaf Children's Society, and what we are
hearing from them is a flexible view of life. If you say to them “are you deaf or
hearing?” they say, “I'm deaf, but I can hear with my implant. I'm hearing and I'm
deaf”. People that have discussed this at the World Federation for the Deaf have
said to me I have never thought before, maybe you can be deaf and hearing in
different situations. So there is a huge diversity of outcomes from cochlear
implantation. We need to bring them together, from the psychology fields,
educational fields and linguistic fields so much more, but we need to actually ask the
people who really know what is happening and that's these young people and the
children themselves and the families of course. Thank you.
CHAIR: I'm actually taking my position as a chair and saying, I won't ask other
members to comment at this stage, because we are so late, otherwise we shall miss
other questions. But when we finish early, if anybody wants to make a comment,
with great pleasure.
Question four, Mandy Robins.
SPEAKER: Mandy Robins, clinical psychologist is not able to be here today, so as a
member of staff of DCAL, I'm going to pose a question for her.
The question is: for a child who hasn't yet acquired any language, signed or spoken,
at a certain age do you think there will be ongoing problems for that child?
CHAIR: Ian, would you like to answer to that?
IAN NOON: I think the answer to that is they are more likely to have problems. I
think everything we have heard this morning signifies that. I think that failure to
provide support from early years will have long‑ term costs as well, I think that is a
real false economy. I think it's really important that we are not too defeatist and not
too absolute in our messages, there have been cases in the past where the parents
of deaf children who has been diagnosed late is basically doomed and that is the
wrong message to be sending out to parents. I think it is the role of the teacher of
the deaf to help the child overcome those disadvantages and there is a lot that can
be done to help deaf children.
CHAIR: Thank you. Anybody else who would like to say something? Can I ask you
to do third and can I have a second one? Yes.
BRIGITTE MCWHINNEY: I just wanted to say that there is a redeeming strength in
the unity of the deaf community. When a child joins the deaf community when they
reach adulthood after what is labelled as a failed education or they don't sign well or
speak well or whatever, gentlemen join the deaf community and that's where they
find a bit of sanity and a lot of support.
CHAIR: Thank you.
GWEN CARR: I think it's about communication rather than speech or sign and
whether a child has developed an internal language. We know, through research on
a wide range of children, not necessarily deaf, that if you don't develop an internal
language, a receptive language, early on, yes, it is likely that you will not develop
your full capability, full potential, linguistically later. So I think if parents ask me that,
I often say: concentrate on communicating, get that communication in and you can
unlock the expression, whether through sign or through speech, at a later date. But
we have many children, you know, my background is in hearing children as well, who
aren't speaking very early on. But if they are understanding and they have
developed language and a communication mode, you can develop that expression
later on. So I actually think it's about quality of interaction early on and don't get too
hung up about the mode of expression but really look for quality interaction.
[applause]
CHAIR: Is there anybody else on the panel that would like to add anything? I see
that they say no.
SPEAKER: Well may I ‑ ‑ well some of them ‑ ‑ first of all, are we allowed?
GARY: Yes, if the chair ‑ ‑ you can ...
SPEAKER: Okay, I just wanted to remind people of the data that was presented this
morning by Kearsy showing how, in fact, with respect to one aspect of language that
is appreciating the order of words in sentences, which is critical, indeed age seems
to matter, the age at which language is being acquired and to keep that in mind, and
just ‑ ‑ so there is in fact an evidence base ‑ ‑ I fully agree you shouldn't be
fatalistic in any way, but there is evidence that suggests that indeed it is a problem.
CHAIR: Thank you very much. We shall have the possibility of comments from the
floor, professors or not professors, if we finish on time, or if we decide to stay on,
which I'm quite happy to do.
Can I please now move to the next question, which is from Lara Casca.
SPEAKER: Hello, I'm doing a Masters research project on play therapy as a really
effective intervention for young deaf children who struggle with a secure attachment
or lack of secure attachment to their hearing parents. From that point of view I'm just
wanting to ask, what do you consider are the immediate and also the long‑ term
implications of early identification on this development of a secure attachment of
deaf children born to hearing parents?
CHAIR: I will ask Hilary Sutherland to answer.
HILARY SUTHERLAND: What is so imperative is the issue of bonding. I think it's
like we said earlier, it is important that a parent is comfortable and able to bond with
their child, to have quality interactions with their children whether or not that is with
BSL speech or otherwise is relevant. What is important at this point is an able to
communicate and that everybody is comfortable, parents and child, and that they
have a way of relating and in that they are able to develop the bonds, because if that
is interfered with, they will never be comfortable. My feeling is that there has been a
lot of emphasis on making choice as to how to communicate, which method to take,
and I think that's not where the focus should be. It should remain fluid. My concern
is that they have access to language, they have access to interaction, and the child
in time will gradually choose ‑ ‑ my PhD involved me approaching children and
asking them what they would choose, what language they would want to choose,
sign language or speech, and a lot of those children said, well it depends who I am
with and that will allow me to feel comfortable whether I'm going to sign with this
person or write with this person or whatever. But for a child to answer that way, for a
child to respond that way, needs them to feel confident and where they get their
confidence from is how they were brought up with their parents and if their parents
are not confident that creates a child who is also not confident. So it is really
important that the way that the parents interact with the child allows the child to feel
comfortable, to feel confident, to communicate in whichever method feels
appropriate at that time. And as was mentioned earlier, I think what's important is
that that is just natural and we need to see a lot more of that and that comes from
having a good, bonded relationship.
[applause]
BRIGITTE MCWHINNEY: Okay, I'm thinking again as a mother and I'm quite lucky,
I've enjoyed the honour of raising four children and they are all deaf and one of them
wears hearing aids and speaks for himself and another one of them is severely ‑ ‑
hearing! So for me obviously it is a lot of work but in our family we all sign and as
Hilary mentioned before that, the issue of comfort and confidence means that we
never miss opportunities to laugh and to play around, and I think too often what I
have seen with other families, where they have a deaf child, is that it becomes very
serious, and every conversation is a lesson, and I think: that's not fun. I think it
needs to go back to not worrying about English and speech or whatever, you know,
those things will come, it is just important to be able to explore and to see and, you
know, there is enough opportunities to be exposed to English, but relationship is only
going to come in that environment for them to be able to go out and about and see
and learn and those things will come, and it doesn't matter if you are using sign
language or pulling faces and gestures or whatever, because when there is a child
you are feeding them all of it and it can all happen. What is important is that there is
a huge element of fun.
[applause].
CHAIR: If I could make a comment, really what matters is love without any feeling of
guilt or wanting to improve too much.
Any more comments?
SUE ARCHBOLD: Just a very quick one. You chose the word effortless before,
about effortless communication and I think for hearing parents of deaf children so
often things in the early days can be such an effort. We have appointments, we
have people that we've never heard of coming into our lives, we have the teacher of
the deaf, or the speech and language therapist, an audiologist, we have all of these
appointments and we are advised to do different things and I think we need to
support parents in those early days for communication to be effortless and to be fun,
because unless we get the communication right the rest will not follow. And
sometimes we get the technology and they are just too early in lives really and it can
interfere with that communication unless it is handled in very sensitive ways. With
love.
SPEAKER: We just had a very strong hand here. It is up to you to ‑ ‑
CHAIR: I think I'm delighted to follow what you suggest!
SPEAKER: Thank you very much. I would really like to comment on Lara's question
myself. I'm a parent of a deaf child myself, I stand here today on the basis that my
daughter was born deaf. I left the mining industry and became a teacher of the deaf
based on the fact that I was worried about how my daughter was going to manager
in school. I can actually stand here now talking about the early identification. I was
very lucky, as Katherine was born prior to newborn hearing screening, and you
know, we had the grief elements and all of the angst that came when we were
diagnosed and it was late, it was about 18 months and so we felt more guilty.
However, that 18 months was so crucial of me getting on the floor and doing the
playing and doing all the stuff that I was doing with my other boys and it was ‑ ‑ I
actually look back on that and think to myself: that really set the actual foundations
for everything. We went ‑ ‑ myself and my wife ‑ ‑ we paid ‑ ‑ and I agree with
the gentleman earlier it is disgusting that we have to have a teacher of the deaf and
audiologist now and I think it's disgusting we have to ask parents to spend ridiculous
amounts of money to learn sign language, I paid myself to learn sign language, the
family learned to do sign language, I do not profess to be the best sign language
user in the world and when we talk about the 59 per cent I am concerned that
hearing people we are not native sign language signers, we are learning with the
children but we tried our best and brought her on. I know Sue very well, she had a
cochlear implant and then she had a second cochlear implant years later and she
uses them both and I'm very proud to say that she is actually going into sixth form,
she has had one A star and seven C grades at school in a mainstream education.
[applause]. And that is (inaudible). And I know that I do a lot of work and I support
her as well at home but actually it's about the child, she does have concerns about
where she is and I agree, is she deaf, is she hearing or is she cochlear implanted?
That is an issue that she has, but she moves beautifully in both circles. She has
deaf friends and she has hearing friends and thank you to the Ear Foundation for
doing that as well because they set up a lot of good things. Thank you.
[applause].
CHAIR: Shall we go to the questions?
GARY: You go Simonetta, you go.
CHAIR: Very difficult now, re difficult! We are going to call question number six
now, which is Malcolm Sinclair.
SPEAKER: Okay, hi I'm a teacher of the deaf and what I've noticed is that a lot of
the children that have a cochlear implant who I've seen speaking very well and seem
to use their hearing very well but as they got older actually I notice that a lot are very
keen on learning sign language and I'm interested in that. Do you know why?
CHAIR: Who is going to answer that? I think each of you has to!
Let's start from the far end. Could you do that Ian?
IAN NOON: I think there are a wide range of reasons for children who want to learn
sign language. I don't think cochlear implants are a cure for deafness, I know some
children struggle to make sense of the world around them and in school in the
canteen it can be hard work to try and follow what is going on so it really doesn't
surprise me that they would want to use sign language in a playground atmosphere
or in difficult situations and I think it is a really positive thing for deaf children to be
able to use different communication strategies in different circumstances according
to what works for them.
HILARY SUTHERLAND: I think it is a process, too. I think in some environments
you will find it easier to communicate in one way or another and I think it also allows
you a chance to learn more about yourself, where you function well, where you are
weak, where you hear better in certain environments; so I just think it helps you to
have a better understanding of yourself along your own life's journey. I think it also
allows you the chance to exclude certain things as you grow up. I think it's important
for younger children to be exposed to every opportunity and every chance to
communicate and expose themselves to how they feel in certain environments, what
they are seeing, what they feel exposed to and by having those various exposures
they are not being limited but be able to limit themselves if they want to. But to be
able to do that you need opportunities open to you so you can approach each thing
with an open mind and decide what is for you or not for you and when you are an
adult you can make decisions or change your mind, but if you haven't had that you
grow up feeling like you've always missed out or you were prevented from
experiencing different things. I think it's important to get that exposure. NEW
SPEAKER: For me I think I agree with Hilary's point actually. For deaf children, I
mean we know that there is a large number of deaf children who use sign language
or speak, but when they leave school, they may find the deaf community, once they
have left school, and it's like they have got a passport suddenly into the deaf world,
but when they are younger what's important is that they are encouraged and that's
one of the main points today, that opportunity is there now while they are young so
they can see the deaf community and can see all opportunities and can make the
decisions for themselves when the time is right, where they want to be, when they
want to be and I think it's important. It can become quite a crisis for a person's
identity if you've not had a chance to be exposed to something as a child, then when
you find it as a teenager or suddenly a crisis hits because you are rediscovering your
identity you wish you had been exposed to as a young child, that can lead to issues
of mental illness or a general unwell being. This is a big problem that happens to
deaf children anyway, this is irrespective of whether you are signing, speaking or
have an implant. What is important is we make sure those that have implants are
exposed to the opportunities and they can make those choices. BRIGITTE
McWHINNEY: It's a good example of what's called deaf gain. You should stop
thinking of hearing loss. Gain - that was a phrase coined at world federation of the
deaf congress, someone presented a paper saying that the richness of deaf
community was nothing to do with loss, it's not hearing loss, it's deaf gain. That's
quite good. GWEN CARR: I was at an NDCS newly diagnosed weekend not so
long ago. I always start by asking the parents to tell me a little bit about them and
their child. They went round, my child is called so and so and he is profoundly deaf,
always described in audiological terms. Then one parent said “I used to have a deaf
child but now he has had a cochlear implant” and that rang alarm bells with me and I
think we need to be really careful and make sure that identity isn't sacrificed, take it
out of the equation because children with an implant are still deaf children. To me it's going to be a bit controversial – but it really upsets me that we still have to ask
that question, why should they prefer to sign - why shouldn't they? We talked about
effortless early on. As professionals, deaf role models, anybody in the field, we
need to stop making deaf parents and children feel they can't do it. We take the
skills away from parents and take normal expectations, I don't mean typically hearing
I mean expectations of a good life and successful career away by assuming it's all
going to be so hard. Half the audience here is living proof that success is available
to everybody. We should accept everybody is entitled to their personal identity,
whatever they are comfortable with and in whatever circumstances. I couldn't agree
more with what Hilary said, it's about what you are doing and the time and where you
feel comfortable. We have to make sure when we make choices for our children we
are making choices that keep their choices for the future open. SUE ARCHBOLD:
I'm getting instructions. Thank you Hilary for what you said. I think that old question
of to sign or not to sign is that question - maybe it's not a question any more - that
should be asked and people -- the question that we were asked was about cochlear
implantation, but it's not just about cochlear implantation, it's about newborn hearing
screening, changing expectations, digital aids, all this technology that's getting into
lives, there is nothing about a cochlear implant that stops anybody signing. It's about
communication and what I see is vast numbers of young people round the world with
implants, digital aids, with nothing, they are growing up and in some ways finding
almost new ways, flexible ways of being deaf, hearing youngsters are growing up in
different ways. These deaf young people are finding different ways forward. It's not
just about hearing technology use, it's about skype, all the rest of it, opportunities. I
see many of these young people just speaking and signing and changing modality
easily and with confidence and we need them to grow up to be confident in their own
communication capabilities and making their own choices, we have just had a
European team camp and we have a more diverse group of young people than
we've ever had before, which makes research even more complicated, but European
teams of deaf teenagers and one young person from Norway who said to me, I have
Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, English, sign. It was one of his languages and he was
confident in them all and changed happily between one and the other. We have to
find ways of finding this diverse group to move forward confident in their
communication skills, whatever they choose and to give them real choices. Maybe
cochlear implants helps us with true bilingualism and have real choices for both.
SIMONETTA AGNELLO-HORNBY: Did your boy know all the sign languages in
the different languages?
SUE ARCHBOLD: No, he knew Norwegian sign language,
but by the time he left the UK he knew quite a bit of English sign language.
SIMONETTA AGNELLO-HORNBY: Any more comments from the panel? NEW
SPEAKER: Can I just ask a question, sorry to interrupt. SIMONETTA AGNELLOHORNBY: Do you want to ask it now or at the end? Do ask it now. GARY:
Simonetta, is he allowed? SIMONETTA AGNELLO-HORNBY: He is allowed to
ask the question, he can ask it now or later, but he can ask the question. NEW
SPEAKER: It's for Sue, what you were just talking about, I'm a Teacher of the Deaf
and I have been for 10 years, one thing I have noticed is that audiologists in
implantation, one thing they often say to parents when talking about influence and
communication is if you want your children to have an implantation ordinarily the best
place would be a non signing environment. As a Teacher of the Deaf, from my point
of view, the attempt to have a sign working environment where we see implantation
and why is it you can't change the attitude from children with implants and BSL to
actually – (too fast) -- sorry I apologise, I will go, slower, sorry. So you were saying
about the fact that children with implantation, there is no reason why they shouldn't
want to learn BSL, but I think it should be the other way round; if you use BSL they
won't notice, and I think we need to think about both sides of that aptitude really.
SUE ARCHBOLD: Sorry, a quick answer - anybody who gives you a quick answer
to these difficult questions, it's too simple. You know that old saying, there is a quick
and easy answer to every difficult question and it will be wrong. So I think we need
to be very careful about terminology too, whether we are using British Sign
Language or sign supported English. If the child has cochlear implants and hearing
spoken language and acquiring spoken language and like many of these children are
acquiring language through their hearing they need to hear spoken language, that's
self evident. We did a research study that we've tried to use at cochlear implant
centre and supported by the NDCS in Gwen's time looking at communication
possibilities. We have many examples of video at the Ear Foundation we use on our
training courses showing children going through communication journeys, using sign
support, maybe British Sign Language, early communication and maybe developing
spoken language, maybe with signed support but also the possibility of learning sign
language too. But we need to be extremely careful because cochlear implant
centres, it isn't helpful if somebody says if you sign with your child they will never
talk, because there is evidence that that is not the case. But equally true of course is
if you don't talk to your child and if you use British Sign Language as your main
mode of communication your child is never going to learn to use that new hearing
effectively. So it's a long and complicated issue. I would also reiterate what's been
said throughout, every child and every family is different and we have to look at each
individual family. HILARY SUTHERLAND: When the child has an implant in itself
that's fine. My concern is when every element is about the hearing, about their
speech and actually the signing, the access to the signing, is of equal importance. In
their home life they are likely to have a hearing family and at school amongst hearing
teachers and friends, where is their opportunity for them to get exposure to genuine
quality BSL, British Sign Language, and so they are already at a disadvantage
because they are not being exposed to it every day. We hear stories time and time
again that if people fail within the system, if they are too difficult then you will teach
them sign language as a back up and actually it should never have been a back up,
it should have been from the very beginning. I think what's important for these
children is that we just continue to give them lots and lots of opportunities and don't
just focus on speech, but actually we can give them both and that way the child can
make those decisions and have that equal footing. (Applause)
SUE ARCHBOLD: Can I just say one thing. The best thing in the research one
father said to us, he said: won't somebody let me communicate with my child?
CHAIR: I will come to the point where I stop other comments and we go ahead to
the last question and then we can have the floor open to questions because I'm told
we have to finish in 15 minutes, unless we can change it. I think I have to ask you
really to be really quick, otherwise it would not be fair to the public and to the others.
BRIGITTE MCWHINNEY: Well actually my comment might lead on to the final
question, I believe, which is just to say that although I agree with a lot of what you
said, Sue, when you reinforce the concept of diversity and that each child is different,
I think that that very word is a very dangerous term and it's a double‑ edged sword
and my reason for saying that is that I think that the educational establishments
mainly constituted of hearing professionals is actually using that diversity and "every
child is different" to keep the deaf community at bay and to not involve that deaf
community so easily, so I think we need to keep our eyes open about it and to really
be aware that there is a clash of culture and there are very different values held by
hearing people and held by deaf people. Hearing matters to hearing people. It
doesn't matter so much to deaf people.
CHAIR: Thank you very much. [applause].
Question 7, please, Julie Halden.
SPEAKER: Okay, I would just like to say as well, as a practitioner I have really
valued today, it is fantastic, so to those who have organised it and for those who
have contributed, I've just learned so much which I hope I'm going to be able to take
away today and which relates to my last question which is: how can we ensure that
practitioners and researchers work better together in order to support
evidence‑ based practice which is so important, as we have we've heard to?
CHAIR: Who is going to start first?
GWEN CARR: I think one of the things we can do is to stop ‑ ‑ I'm saying this with
my researcher hat on, okay? I think we need to stop trying to prove what we want to
prove for the benefit of our own biases or interests and actually start asking parents
and older deaf children who have experience through our system and in their lives
these days, what are the big issues for them, and what are the things we want to see
evidence about? Because when you look at, you know, I have just been doing a
piece of work actually for NDCS reviewing some of the current research in early
intervention and I'm weeping at the end of my first week of looking because so much
is setting out a hypothesis that the researcher wants to be true and then they try their
very best to prove they were right all along and, you know, for every one I find over
here I find another one that is the opposite. So instead of researchers going into
practice and going into families and saying, "I'm researching on this and I would like
you to be my subject", why don't we ask families and young deaf people and those
working with deaf people and deaf people themselves, what are the big questions
that we actually want our researchers to engage with us on? So I would like to turn it
on its head a little bit I think and almost start again.
[applause].
SUE ARCHBOLD: Thank you, Gwen, you are absolutely right, and I go back to the
days when I ‑ ‑ when I was in the classroom researchers used to come in and do
their bit of research and yes, you would read their research report and it would have
absolutely nothing to do with the children that I was teaching every day because they
had misinterpreted and they had their own agenda to start with. It comes back to
this old argument of quantitative research and the hard science and the qualitative
research not being valued and the qualitative research where we are really exploring
the issues and listening to parents, listening to families, seeing what the issues are
without our pre‑ conceived ideas and without thinking that having your research
hypothesis is the only way to carry out research, because it is not.
But recently, things are moving, I feel. The international journal of audiology
recently, which is a really hard science journal and difficult to get published in, it
recently had a great long article about the value of qualitative research and how
important it is to do rigorous qualitative research and to do it well to get to the heart
of the matter. So I thought, well there is a little lightbulb to move on, so you are
absolutely right, Gwen, we need to move on in new ways for research.
CHAIR: Hilly?
HILARY SUTHERLAND: I grew up and attended a deaf school, my son is deaf and
what I've seen over the years is there have been some phenomenal changes. Back
then there were no cochlear implants there was no mainstreaming but what I have
seen for the second generation, if you like, is more challenges. I think for the
parents they will be paying out of their own personal budgets for their own support, it
is going to create a great impact on deaf children. People will be making choices
without really knowing exactly what they want and I think the issue of research is
important. For the last ten years, any research had been considered out of date
anyway, so we need to be looking at the current pool of children that we have now
and we need to be learning from them now, finding out what is helpful and what is
not helpful and finding out what we can design so that we can create a new way
forward, rather than thinking what we think may be the best thing. Because actually
we've made a lot of mistakes over the last many years and I think now is the time
that we really crucially need to let the parents have some element or have more
knowledge, more power. Where are they getting the information from? Because
obviously information is a powerful thing and the information can come from
researchers, it might come from education, it might come from the cochlear implant
people, it might come from various organisations who are all competing for air time,
and that's not healthy. I think the last question is that we need to stop. I think we
have been fighting for air time, fighting for ‑ ‑ and what is the point? I think really
we need to be thinking: okay, historically we've not worked together, we never have,
and so you know, like think about islands, you know, fighting, fighting, there
continues to be fighting but actually now is the time for a ceasefire, now is the time to
stop and say: how can we work together on this very important issue and put the
children first? And then maybe let them tell us. We could be led by them rather than
us trying to reinvent the wheel and think about how do we do things, but actually
collaborate for them.
[applause].
SPEAKER: I mean looking at the last 20 years or so ‑ ‑ 120 years, deaf children
over those years have been diagnosed later, which meant it was difficult to repair
issues of language. I think what we know now, though, gives us an opportunity to
make changes. We've got this new research that we have heard this morning, we
know that there is information out there, we can use that to forward ourselves, we
can give better examples and share better experiences and we can get people
moving rather than going back to the Milan conference where slang was thrown out
of the window. I think we really do need to be moving forward. I think today's
questions ‑ ‑ we've heard a lot about what research has been conducted but looking
at bilingual education I think my question that I want us to be asking ourselves really
is maybe we need more than a pilot, so we can compare, so I think it's really
important that we make sure we look to the past and collate different people's
experiences, we collate the professional's experiences and then whether it is through
education or employment or whatever, we can use that to show role models to the
young people so that they can see and there will be changes as of today because if
we get people involved, deaf professionals and hearing professionals of course, as
well as the families of deaf children as well, I think that will be the way forward. I
think that will affect the education for deaf children and that will allow us to have a far
better of quality of education from now.
[applause].
BRIGITTE MCWHINNEY: Okay I have two points ‑ ‑ well, I have lots but I'm only
going to talk about two. First of all I actually agree with this point. I know what you
have just said about trying different things and I think, yes, from me ‑ ‑ I mean, you
know, we already know what works in a high path for many deaf people we know,
but please to those hearing professionals, please listen more to the deaf people.
There's scientific research and that's so useful but we have seen time and time again
what is successful, we know what is successful and we know what hasn't worked
from our own experiences so please don't be backing your own interests thinking
about what works but actually get experiences, get people's opinions and find out,
put money behind investing in the deaf community to help you to change things so
that the deaf children will be taught well. That's my first point.
My second point is, when my first child was born we were at the hospital and I
suspected he was deaf and the doctors said, well, I'm very sad to tell you that we
have something really awful to tell you and he couldn't say that my child was deaf.
And we talked about hearing problems and I said: are you saying my child is deaf?
And he said "oh, yes, well". Anyway, I think for professionals there needs to be
some collaboration working with deaf people because some have a fear of deaf
people and that's not going to help at all, so whether it is doctors, teachers, whether
it is whoever, get working with deaf people so you know more about deaf people, so
you know more about how to deal with a deaf child and get those deaf children
exposed to deaf adults, get the parents exposed to deaf adults because that way
those deaf children when they grow up they are not traumatised, it doesn't
traumatise the parents.
[applause]
CHAIR: Unless anyone is desperate to add anything else? I would like to open,
actually, the floor to any of you who wants to ask some questions. I think we learn
by hearing you, and that's why I have been rushing like mad, actually, and I
apologise for that. If you could ‑ ‑ so we have one person there, two persons here,
and then I shall be kicked out of the building I think!
GARY: That is the first at the back, Simonetta.
CHAIR: Yes.
SPEAKER: Okay, there has been a lot of talk about hearing parents with deaf
children and needing to encourage the use of sign language, education choices, et
cetera, but if we are looking at deaf children with hearing parents that's fine, but what
about deaf children with deaf parents? Now my two children are both deaf and their
support and language is helping but if they have professionals working around them
who are only level 1 I want them to be able to valuable as well but how can they be if
they are teachers and support staff can barely sign? You know a very, very basic
level of sign language, they are not exposing my children to a good level of sign
language. So that means that it is on us to encourage that but also they do need
that within the school environment so that they can be bilingual.
CHAIR: Who wants to answer that question? Who is more competent to do that?
BRIGITTE MCWHINNEY: I think we just agree with you!
HILARY SUTHERLAND: Yes, I agree, I think we do all agree with you.
I mean it comes back to, I guess your rights as a mother and in ensuring that it is
happening, ensuring that the system is working so that you can achieve what is right
and what you would want for your child. My experience with my deaf child was I had
to fight for what I wanted in the same way that my parents had to fight for what they
wanted for me and I'm sure my son, if he has a deaf child, he will be fighting for that
child too. It shouldn't be such a fight, though, should it? It should be an actual right,
anyone would expect their child to be able to go to whatever school or to be able to
do what is right for them and yet that is a major issue and I think that is a big stress
for any parent who has a deaf child is this fighting, and it takes a lot of energy to do
so and yet there is some good research there about the level of stress and
frustrations for parents.
[applause]
CHAIR: Next question.
SPEAKER: My question is about hearing parents of deaf children, if a child has deaf
that has a cochlear implant and they are told that they need to speak at home so that
they can learn to use the implant at home as well, how are they going to be able to
be bilingual if their environment is entirely hearing and then parents must talk or if
they are using both then how does that work? What is the way forward there so we
can make best use the both methods of communication?
SIMONETTA AGNELLOHORNBY: Who is best to answer this question. BRIGITTE McWHINNEY: I mean
I'm not experienced in the issue of cochlear implant because nobody in my family
has one, however the issue of bilingualism, I think you've got part of a family signing
and part of a family speaking. I grew up speaking French, it was treated as another
language within the family, I couldn't be all romantic or sensitive about loving French
more than any other. You know if you are born deaf you don't worry about French,
you just get on and learn to sign, do you know what I mean, it's just whatever is the
crucial language and I think when you are talking about sort of the main need for
communication, I mean I love French, I love reading and writing French, but I mean
that's me and that's for my pleasure, but I wouldn't be that selfish as a parent, for me
I would say what is going to best meet my child's need for the most valuable kind of
communication, so that then is a firm foundation on which you can build on. Once
you have a firm foundation or language then you are exposed to things, all sorts of
attitude, you've got that with BSL, then being exposed to a lot of English and reading
and writing so I think in a hearing family maybe their foundation language is going to
be spoken English, but second language on top could be BSL, but it does require
work, you can romanticise speech, it may well be you need to find out what need is.
SIMONETTA AGNELLO-HORNBY: Any more questions? There was somebody,
2 hands were raised there. NEW SPEAKER: My question is a lot of the Teachers
of the Deaf can't sign and so how are they communicating with the children then?
You know, how are the parents feeling when they see a professional who is
supposed to be teaching their child who can't even communicate with them or if you
are deaf parents and have a Teacher of the Deaf that comes and asks you if you
need an interpreter, surely they should be able to sign, that's a breakdown of a
relationship from the beginning, they are supposed to be the way to help you get
what you need, if a Teacher of the Deaf can't sign then what? SIMONETTA
AGNELLO-HORNBY: Ian Noon, can you reply to that IAN NOON: I'm baffled, a
Teacher of the Deaf that doesn't sign, I agree with you completely. SIMONETTA
AGNELLO-HORNBY: There was another question there or no longer. GARY: It’s
our tea break now. SIMONETTA AGNELLO-HORNBY: We did start late, but we
shall break then. I shall comply. I am afraid there are no more questions. Just give
me a chance, I'm trying to round up and I think what we have learnt is that we've got
to follow common sense and give a tremendous amount of love to the children and
remind, not ask, the Government to provide communication that our children
deserve, there is a difference between demanding and asking. Can I just finish by
saying once I had a client who had a child who had a disability, which was not
hearing it was Downs Syndrome, the social services were involved and the
grandmother came, nobody wanted to tell her what it was, she looked at the baby
and understood and said this is going to be the best Down Syndrome baby in the
world and the most loved, that child grew into a lovely young girl. It's your work as
educationalists and parents that will make the big change for your children. Thank
you very much and I want to thank the 4 interpreters who have been extraordinary
and helpful to me. GARY: Just before we all dash off for tea or coffee outside,
please hold a on a second. I just want to thank Simonetta the excellent chair who
has been able to do all the work and get everybody answering questions and
working together as a team, what she has been saying at the end there is common
sense. Thank you again Simonetta. Just two things, when you go outside if you
want, and you want to give people your email address you have a networking card in
your name card, whip it out and give it to the person you want to keep in contact
with. There are 5 sign language interpreters in that room. If you want to talk to a
deaf person, like Brigitte McWhinney said, and you feel uneasy or a deaf person
wants to talk to a hearing person etcetera, please grab the sign language interpreter
and they will work with you thank you very much, we'll see you after the tea break.
(Break) GARY: Okay everybody we need to start, we are running late. This is the
last part of the day where we want to turn things over to you. We planned a couple
of things; we are going to talk just little bit about what is involved in doing research
because a lot of people maybe think that research is about having a great idea one
day in the bath and then writing it down and sending it off to a journal and everything
happens. We wanted to explain a little bit what are the factors that limit our work. I
know that sounds a bit negative, but we want people to be aware of what we can do
and can't do within the research framework. Then I'm going to pass over to a DCAL
researcher, Kate Rowley, who is going to talk about some brand new research she is
doing on deaf children's changing identity and then we've got hopefully 30 minutes at
the end where we would like to hear any ideas about what you've got buzzing in your
heads about new research projects. We've heard lots of things this morning already
- why don't you do this, this would be a good thing for research. A lot of people have
asked me today where can I get all this information, as soon as we've finished the
conference we'll send you all an email that says here's all the information, all the
presentations, all the talks, videos, background on the speakers, all of those things
will be sent to you and links to blogs and twits. So we talked about this this morning.
How do practitioners, professionals, families use research and how do researchers
do accessible relevant and useful research. I really enjoyed the idea of cultural
differences between deaf and hearing that was in the panel today, but there is also
interesting cultural differences between universities and the rest of the world and the
way university does research, the way it expects people to behave, act and carry out
their work sometimes isn't as easy to be as flexible and adaptable as many people
want us to be. There are lots of pressures that come to bear on the research
process, so we've got all these new ideas in our heads. One of the important things
that people often ask us is well has anybody done this research before? Is it
innovative? This is really important for research that we are breaking ground, that
we are doing new things but at the same time it means we don't have anything to
help us where we should start. Maybe people who read research think why aren't
they solving these problems, why are they always starting a new problem, a new
idea, why don't they stick to one thing, sort it out and solve it. That's because
researchers come up with innovative new topics to research and it’s got to be data
driven research. I'm sorry Gwen. Sometimes we are trained to do research based
on hypotheses we test out. We are trying to falsify, see that things are not the way
we think they are, there is a whole training that goes into researcher's background,
their PhD, and it's what the research community expects us to do. It gets frustrating
when people are trying to read about research: Why are there all these hypotheses,
why don't they all agree on the same thing and sort it all out. I think one of the major
things for researchers to think about is your idea that you propose feasible, are we
able to do it in 100 hours a week. Do we need 15 researchers to do it or do we need
a million pounds to do this how feasible is your idea. Also the people, who is
involved in our research team? Have they got the expertise? Are they the right
people at the right time? Sometimes people change in the research project and the
research has to change with it. We have people from the ESRC today who give us
our research funding they have very strict ideas about what they expect to get from
us, sometimes there is a clash between what they expect, what we can do, what the
community needs, sometimes everything goes well and we are all in agreement,
these are all things that limit or play a role in the research process. Here's a couple
of ideas for you, if you want to propose, come on DCAL, why don't you sort this
problem out, why don't you improve how deaf children learn mathematics, that's your
project for the next 2 years. That will be a really relevant useful project to do, also an
impossible project for a research centre, there is too many ideas in that one
question, it's too big, people think there is just one idea, learning mathematics, but
there is lots of questions there. The researcher would immediately get goose
pimples and not be able to sleep at night with what do they mean by mathematics,
what do they mean by improvement, how can we measure improvement, what
example, is it longitudinal - all these questions limit the researcher's ability to solve
your problem. Here is a better question: has deaf children's reading ability changed
since 1979. That's something we could do, given a lot of money, a lot of people,
time and experts, we could give you a definitive answer, yes it's changed for these
deaf people with these life experiences and this is how it's changed. We could do
that but it would be very difficult for us to try and solve the first question because it
would have to be broken down into 10 different questions with 10 different projects.
This is maybe demystifying research. There are questions that are important,
relevant and useful, but very difficult for us to achieve. Great, I'm going to
pass over now to Kate Rowley who is going to talk about some new research that
she has been doing, I think it's interesting because it's trying to look at the way deaf
children are changing in society. NEW SPEAKER: Before I actually start talking
about my project I just wanted to make a comment about something that came up
earlier, about working together. I know we've got a lot of practitioners in the
audience working with deaf children and I think it's probably important that you
publish or you share the work that you are doing, you know, you are working with
deaf colleagues, with children, it's really important that you are publishing case
studies and getting that out to other people, otherwise people are working in a very
isolated way without sharing information and I think maybe you could have specialist
interest groups and then publish from that. So I guess it's just a suggestion I wanted
to throw out to you. They can't find my presentation so we'll just hold on.
Okay I'll make a start, you are just going to have to watch me sign. In looking at
changing language and identity I have been working with NC Woll(?) and NDJ(?),
the three of us have worked together on this project, the aim of the project is to look
at different groups of deaf children in different situations with mainstream CFWs and
oral deaf hearing children in hearing schools and oral deaf children. We were
looking at their language, sign, English and also identity and self esteem. So
the reason for the research -- well I mean the history of education, there has been
many changes compared with our parents generation. Most deaf schools now -sorry most deaf children are mainstream now and there are questions about their
identity within and whether they are having the right support to access the education.
The age of the participants was 16 to 20, so sort of 6th form college age, so after
GCSE's had finished. We interviewed 11 from oral school, 7 from mainstream with
CSWs and 3 from a deaf school, sign language, all of them then moved on to college
and because there is not a 6th form college that has sign, so at the point of doing
GCSE's finishing that they then move on to a college. Obviously the numbers are
very different and the smaller 2 groups we really do need more participants. It's an
ongoing piece of research that's not yet finished. We've been doing qualitative and
quantitative research. We've been doing interviews, but also been doing some
assessments.
KATE: We have been doing qualitative and quantitative research so quantitative we
have been doing interviews but we've also been doing some assessments. We have
had background information about families, hearing, when they learned to sign, was
it earlier, was it later, there is a whole series of questions that we've asked. Also
their educational experience: did they feel that was positive or negative? Was it
oral? Was it sign? Did they get access with subtitles? So lots of questions arson
their education access.
We also do a self‑ esteem questionnaire so assess their confidence and
self‑ esteem and we will talk more about the questionnaires later, the identity
questionnaire later.
The questionnaires were in both English and BSL and they were cognitive
assessments as well. The self‑ esteem, there didn't seem to be much difference
between the three groups. The deaf signers who were in school, the results were
higher, but there weren't any significant differences.
So deaf acculturation, we did questions linked to deaf culture, hearing culture and we
questioned in two different ways. There were four possibilities. A person who felt
really linked to the deaf culture or hearing culture or possibly both, had both and
could switch between, or felt there was no culture, they didn't feel part of the deaf or
hearing communities and they were marginalised as a result.
Now ‑ ‑ and this is ongoing research and we've not finished all the analysis yet, so
please don't take this as the final research. We looked at the different groups ‑ ‑
the deaf oral group and the deaf mainstream group and the deaf signers ‑ ‑ and it
seemed the results with the deaf culture and hearing culture and both didn't seem to
be much different. With the signing group we only had three, so that's quite a small
number, so we need to be very careful with interpreting the results from that. But if
you look at the last two groups in terms of hearing family and deaf family, it would
seem that those from a deaf family were more linked into the deaf culture or 2 said
they were bi‑ culture, they were deaf and hearing.
From a hearing family it seemed that they were a little bit more attuned to hearing
culture, but it was only a little bit, it wasn't significant. Obviously we need more
participants in the project.
The deaf oral group, there were a large number from deaf families, so we do need to
be careful how we interpret the results.
Okay, so we did language and cognitive assessments. We did the repeating test, we
did semantic fluency and reading tests and also cognitive assessment for verbal IQ
and there were low language scores ‑ ‑ we were interested to see whether there
was a correlation between low language scores and lower IQ.
I want you to ignore the dark blue for the moment and focus on the BSL/SRT and the
repeated tests first. So the repeating tests, the sentence repetition was delivering a
sentence in sign and then copying it back, it was to look at fluency in BSL. The first
column of scores ‑ ‑ sorry, there are the scores on the bottom of the different
groups. We have deaf oral group on the far side and then deaf signing group and
then deaf mainstream. The scores seem to vary with the BSL/SRT results and I've
not yet analysed the different results in detail but in the DO1, 2, 3 and 4 it seems
high and DM4 as well. They are mostly coming from deaf families who have used
sign language from an early age, so they would score highly in the BSL/SRT. But
DS2 and DS3 in the middle are deaf families as well but have scored low in the
BSL/SRT and I don't yet know what the problem is, why from deaf families the
scores should be lower, so that needs investigating.
The two from the deaf signing school had low English scores as well compared with
the others, so it was low English and low BSL/SRT. So I'm wondering if there is a
correlation between those, you know, low ability skills in English and in the BSL/SRT
test.
We have been talking about breeding a foundation of a strong first language so that
children coming from a sign language environment using sign language you would
expect a higher score.
Talking about reading age, the ceiling is 15. You go above 16/17, that was the
ceiling. So 15/16 was the ceiling score and only four from the 17 reached that.
Bearing in mind they are 16 to 20 years old in terms of their age, only four reached
that ceiling, so were at the appropriate reading age. The rest were lower,
significantly lower. They were assessed through the course of the year and
remembering that they had all come from different school settings, so they are not
having age‑ appropriate English.
The semantic fluency I mentioned in the earlier talk is giving people a minute to
come up with as many animals or foods that they can think of. There was not really
any difference. Some observations though. The mainstreamers used more finger
spelling, a little more. The oral group seemed to use, say, if they were saying
broccoli would initialise the B or they wouldn't give the full sign, they could just start
the word and obviously the deaf signing group would sign.
But the numbers of items of vocabulary was very much the same. If you would just
like to have a read of this ‑ ‑ oh, sorry, no, before you do that, the interviewer asked
questions about their feelings linked with their education and these are the
responses that we got.
This mainstreamer seemed quite happy with the deaf‑ hearing mix, but didn't want to
be on their own, was concerned that university may well be a place where they were
on their own. They wanted to be in a mixed group, or group of other deaf people.
We asked about their views and their experience of friendship and most of them said
that they have deaf friends more than hearing friends. Some of them did have
hearing friends, but only within the same college. So maybe they were studying the
same subject.
Outside, after school finished, whether they would maintain those friendships is
unclear because they didn't seem to from the previous schools.
A lot of them did their communication with friends through mobile phones, writing, et
cetera, and some natural communication in terms ‑ ‑ I would question whether that
was natural communication, but they did use gesture as well.
I mean in terms of access, it would seem that it was difficult to get access to the full
content, even though some of it would be signed to them. We asked the different
groups a variety of questions and the mainstreamers were saying they didn't have
access to subtitles. Those who went to deaf schools did have subtitles most of the
time. If they didn't, the teacher would pause and explain and then it could be shown
again and then pause and explain. Rather than CSWs signing it all the way through.
In terms of group discussion, this was difficult for the mainstream because the CSWs
were not qualified interpreters and trying to keep up with the speed of discussions
was a problem. It did mean that information would be missed because of this. This
is another comment.
The students wanted that high level of sign, level 3 or 4, and they weren't getting it.
They are having to rely on hearing friends when something isn't clear, ask for the
clarification, and I would question whether that was real access.
It is not all problems. There were some problems about, you know, enjoying working
with CSWs, feeling supported both in and outside the classroom.
So, in conclusion, there are some patterns emerging, particularly with deaf and
hearing families, as I've already outlined. But so far the research ‑ ‑ the numbers
have been small, and we need to look at it with more participants. Some people
have said that mainstream school and CSWs is good and there has been some
evidence, but I'm wondering whether in five years' time they would still maintain that
view. I mean now, having left school, I look back, you know, you may be see things
as different. If young people are in school this is all they know and they may well
feel that what they are receiving is good and they accept it, but having different
experiences post‑ school, they may well feel differently about what happened in
school. The obvious statement to make is that there needs to be improvement both
in schools and colleges. I have been looking at reading age and, as I said, only four
out of 17 had reached the appropriate reading age and we are talking about now,
today, not years ago, so we are still failing the children and we need to improve.
[applause].
GARY: I think it might be worth having one or two minutes for any questions,
questions or clarifications or questions or comments based on Kate's presentation. If
we take this opportunity now?
SPEAKER: I will stand so people can see me should they need to. I have two
points or questions. Well, one is a point, a comment, and one is a question. In the
mid to late 90's I know that the Department of Education at that time supported a
system to be able to track deaf children within education and actually look at their
development, so I'm wondering what happened to that data, those data or that
system. I think the NDCS was actually involved in that so what's happened to that
data? It may be useful to look into that and see what it tells us about that situation. I
know that within mainstreaming often the support that's provided is a CSW and it
may be problematic because it could be for example in a classroom you have 3 deaf
children and they are of different abilities so you need to ensure you are providing
support to the different abilities in this group and whether that's something that's
problematic or not. NEW SPEAKER: The project is linked with that, looking at
actual CSWs following their work in education. I mean it depends who they are
working for. Sometimes the student or child will need to alter their capabilities. If
you've got two or three of different levels they will pick the lowest and a child with a
higher capability is missing out on information as a result. What was the other thing?
Oh yes. I don't want to condemn CSWs, they need more support and at the moment
there is insufficient support for CSWs and training and again it needs more money
from Government to provide that training, which means the Government policy
needs to change in order to supply that to make it happen. NEW SPEAKER: Ian
Noon, you may have a response as a representative of NDCS. IAN NOON: I'm
not sure that you are talking about the -- the Government do (inaudible) on children
with a lot of special educational needs. Unfortunately that only applies to about 60
per cent of all deaf children. What we need the Government to do is start collecting
data of all disabled children, including deaf children. I'll have a chat with you chaps
later. NEW SPEAKER: It's interesting, the Government often encourages
research to occur, but we don't know what happens to the data attached to that
research. I think we are now going to change the focus of the discussion that we
have now to actually think about research ideas. Do we have any ideas about what
would be usefully researched? I think Kate and I are going to try and manage this
Q&A or comments and questions. It's also important to say that if you feel that you
don't want to raise an issue now there are other possibilities, of course. As I
mentioned before, there is the blog via the website and you can also tweet the
information, so please do make sure that you pass on any thoughts you have for us,
whether now or later. I think we'll look at questions that we want to be party to future
research. I think what might be better for this session is to actually ask people to
come down to the front and a queue of no more than 5. So that's 5 for now, please
everybody else do stay in your seats. Remember that Gary did talk about research
that's feasible, so we also want something which is a potential discreet project, which
we can actually do research on, rather than the 64 million dollar question. I think we
are just going to take responses from the floor. I believe the first one goes to you.
NEW SPEAKER: I work within education and I know that for deaf children, 14 to 16,
when they are transitioning into further education often people coming in from
mainstream have a variety of different language skills and there is no necessary
evidence of whether they have dyslexia or other problems that they have. I was just
wondering if we have any way of actually being able to assess or measure things like
dyslexia to see whether we have the same occurrence of dyslexia in deaf people as
we do in the mainstream population. It seems there is not much information about
deaf people in dyslexia and whenever I have tried to look into that area it doesn't
seem to be particularly focused or concise. I'm just wondering whether we could
look into dyslexia of deaf children. NEW SPEAKER: I don't know if you want to
talk about that. NEW SPEAKER: I think maybe if we take all of the 5 questions
and then allow the panel to field answers. NEW SPEAKER: I know a lot of
valuable research has been done looking at -- I know there has been lots of useful
research on families of learnt BSL and children that have learnt English as a second
language as a consequence of being fluent in BSL as a first language, also some
deaf children with very good English, but never learnt BSL, mainly through
lipreading, that's inconvenient to some people, people don't like to acknowledge that,
people feel you have to learn BSL, but I'm just wondering whether we should be
looking at why those people, what was successful for them in using lipreading to be
able to learn English. Why do they have good English? Maybe it's been researched
already, I don't know, but I haven't seen it. NEW SPEAKER: Hello everybody.
I'm really interested in SLI, specific language impairment. My daughter has SLI and
I'm interested to know more and then also whether that also manifests with dyslexia
as well, which appears to be what my daughter experiences. I would also like to see
greater awareness of SLI. Often people say your child has SLI but it's not clear what
I can do as a mother to support my daughter with her language needs. It's a little bit
similar to dyslexia, but just thinking about how you can work with parents in
supporting their children. NEW SPEAKER: I have two issues which I think are
overlapped. I have worked for many years in college with deaf people who are
learning English and it seems that there are two issues, one is focusing on deaf
young people who arrive from overseas and perhaps have learnt English via deaf
education to see how that can then influence the practices that we see occurring
within college. I don't know how much research, evidence, has actually influenced
the Government to change the goal posts that they are setting for further educational
colleges. It would be great to work with kids through primary school and to prevent
the damage we then have to rectify within FE. I would be fascinated if there was any
research that could be done within further educational institutions to stop the local
education authorities implementing their own agendas, which seem to be causing
problems for deaf people who are wanting to gain good literacy. I think it's about
protecting our deaf children now as they get older. I know that Winston Churchill
travelling fund has funded some people and I was fortunate to benefit from that and I
looked at deaf people's access to literacy, but I haven't seen everything, so that
would be great. NEW SPEAKER: I know that there are many deaf children whose
education and experience has not improved within FE, so I'm just wondering why
don't we actually research how deaf children learn because often the national
curriculum is on hearing children and we try to adapt that to meet the needs of deaf
children. Why don't we do it a different way and look at how deaf children learn and
then develop a national deaf curriculum which suits their learning needs.
NEW SPEAKER: Those are 5 really interesting well made points. Lots of big
questions too. I'll hand over to Ros Herman who is an expert on dyslexia. ROS: I'll
try and keep it short, I know people do want to leave. Just to say that’s a very good
question, there is not really any research on dyslexia in deaf people and that's one of
the reasons we are doing some of that research right now because we've got a
hearing child. There are lots of diagnostic tests. We know many deaf children have
problems reading anyway, so trying to find out if there is dyslexia on top of that is
difficult. A lot of psychologists are really uneasy about labelling deaf children as
dyslexic. What we are doing at the moment is we've completed part 1 of a 2 phase
study, looking at oral deaf children and signing children separately because we think
they read differently, therefore the patterns might look different. So we've got
already some information, some data we've collected on 80 oral deaf children aged
10, we've looked at their reading, speech reading and their language and
phonological awareness. Our preliminary findings look like the same sorts of factors
are associated with oral deaf children's reading as hearing deaf children's reading.
Now the next phase is to look at signing deaf children and we really don't know what
we are going to find, so ask me that question in a couple of years time. I think it's
really important because I think we do know there are deaf children out there who do
struggle beyond what we expect because they are deaf children. NEW
SPEAKER: The second question is related to those who haven't learnt BSL, but are
still able to have good reading via speech. NEW SPEAKER: There is lots of
research out there. The first slide I put up this morning showed trend in the data set
that I have, that showed that people who are native signers on average are better
readers than non native signers, but you could see in that graph there was a great
spread in ability in both groups and in fact if you took the group as a whole the better
readers were those people that didn't have BSL as their native language. There is
this great variability in the language background and it's hard as researchers to take
that into account. The easiest research to do is with native signers. They are a
clean cut group to look at and we know essentially what we are dealing with, but they
are a tiny population and the vast majority of children born deaf are not in that
situation. As researchers we are asking basic science questions, because if we do
want to test hypotheses that's the key group to work with, but we have to take into
account the whole population. I'm hoping to look at speech reading and oral speech
reading. We will be looking across the board at deaf kids with a range of
backgrounds, hearing parents, deaf parents. I don't know if Kearsy wants to mention
anything there in relation to hearing people, deaf people with hearing parents
learning sign language later on. NEW SPEAKER: I can say something briefly
about that. In the study I talked about this morning where we looked at deaf adults
from deaf families and deaf adults from hearing families and we find a decrease in
accuracy. We find a decrease in accuracy in their performance in that task from
those early learners at aged 8. You remember I mentioned the results from that
study were complicated. One of the other parts of it is that we also look at later
learners, deaf adults who learned BSL after aged 8 up until aged around 17 or so. In
their accuracy on the task we didn't see a significant difference between those late
learners and native signers. One thing we did find was that they were slower in the
task, the late learners were slower in doing the task. The one thing that supports
what Mairead has been saying as well is the late learners were overall better readers
of English than the early learners. We think what was happening is those late
learners, supporting what you said, seem to have been able to learn English to a
degree to use it as a first language. The reason why that happens we are not really
sure about, but you are right, it would be interesting to know a bit more about why.
The huge amount of variability is an issue for research.
NEW SPEAKER: There was also a question with respect to SLI intervention. I think
the question was about SLI. The project that I described actually identified that SLI
does manifest within deaf language populations too, there were sign language users
but of course the next step is once we know that what interventions can there be to
improve the children's language? We know that hearing children who have SLI need
support throughout their lives, so our expectation is that deaf children will also need
to have support throughout their lives, if somebody is diagnosed with SLI. Within the
project I'm not a ‑ ‑ I'm not a language therapist I have to say, I'm not a qualified
language therapist, so although I'm a researcher, I work together with a speech and
language therapist when we are assessing the children and also in terms of the
interventions that we are going to do and then hopefully we will be able to measure
the effectiveness and then publish what seems to work. So similarly, we will follow a
standard research idea where we have one group where we do some kind of
intervention, another group where we do no intervention and then we compare to
see whether there's some improvements for the children that had the intervention
and that then proves that it works, that it is successful. I mean that is our aim. This
again relates to what I said to you earlier: you are the people who are working with
deaf children, so in terms of practitioners working with children, maybe if we try an
intervention, you can try that intervention to see if it works, many of us don't work at
therapists but we are happy to work in collaboration with practitioners so we can
have better interventions in the future. So that's another way of looking at it. So I
hope that answers the question raised, thank you.
GARY: I don't know if there are any more questions? Please do come to the front.
SPEAKER: Whilst people are coming down, can I just add ‑ ‑
SPEAKER: One moment we don't have an interpreter. Now you can.
SPEAKER: Just to say about the interventions, to reinforce what Kate has said, you
working with children out there, we would also like to collaborate with you and turn
some of the work you are doing into the research by looking at individual cases of
children where, you know, you are devising interventions perhaps hopefully which
we can help to begin to look at and see if they can begin to be effective with other
children. So let's get that interchange going on with people out there.
GARY: Maybe one more person to ask a question?
SPEAKER: Hi, I'm a parent of a hearing impaired child who has unilateral deafness
‑ ‑
SPEAKER: Sorry, can I come here, thank you.
SPEAKER: I have been here all day and looking for research to interest the parents
in my parent support group, most of whom have children with either mild or unilateral
losses, so none of them ‑ ‑ or one of them had a 15 uses BSL, one with a 15 that
uses a cochlear implant and all research presented to relates to either sign language
or cochlear implants, which is not ‑ ‑ sorry? So I was wondering first of all as a
general suggestion, could researchers relate to all of the deaf children be
encouraged because the NDCS covers a barely broad swathe of children in its
definition and there is very little research done relevant to this and I know I've
searched and searched and searched for certain types of research and it doesn't
exist at the moment now. One of the areas, which is my specific point, one of the
areas of research I have been told about relates to fatigue, cognitive fatigue for deaf
children and listening effort and how that impacts them in their schooling and in their
lives and I don't know if anybody knows anything about that, and I'm the lady in the
pink jumper if you do! But if there isn't any research about that, could you do some?
Because in every pamphlet it says "deaf children suffer from fatigue in school" and
everyone knows it and all the teachers of the deaf say I know these children are
exhausted after school but there's no quantitative data that you can go and present
to somebody that says: this is the impact that has. So, please.
SPEAKER: It has been an interesting day about language and speech and sign and
cognition and literacy and reading abilities and writing, so lots of interesting
information has been presented. I used to work at DCAL, five and a half years ago, I
left because I thought that the area that I was interested in couldn't be researched,
but maybe it can be, maybe I am wrong. So what am I interested in? I think it's
important that, you know, my experiences working with the NDCS with a variety of
deaf children from a variety of backgrounds, it seems that those children who do well
are the ones that can think for themselves. They have the ability to introspect, they
have the ability to form their own views, they have their own skills and can evaluate
things, they can think for themselves and don't need to be spoon‑ fed. They have
some kind of resilience, I don't know whether that is the most appropriate word or
not, but these children who are able to think to themselves, either maybe talk to
themselves or sign to themselves, and they have that ability to think to themselves,
and it seems to me that that is a strong predicter for good life skills, self‑ esteem, et
cetera. So I'm just wondering, is there any way that we could develop some kind of
assessment which is not about whether people can sign well or speak well or use
their audition, but just in terms of seeing whether they can introspect or think for
themselves?
[applause].
SPEAKER: Sorry, I will face in the right direction.
I was hoping to raise this with the panel, but maybe this is another opportunity to do
that. I know that many deaf families with deaf parents with deaf children, maybe
multiple generations or whatever are able to grow up in houses where nobody
speaks. But some deaf parents do wish that their children learned to speak,
because they appreciate that that is a good life skill and they want them to be able to
sign well, speak well, read well, write well, but in the home environment we know
that there is no speech and often parents wonder about whether it is good to bring
friends or relatives or turn on the radio or use the television to actually develop the
speech. I know somebody from the Ear Foundation previously said that if BSL is the
main communicative language, then the deaf child won't use their audition to speak,
but I know that there are many ‑ ‑ when I asked many erudite doctors who perform
cochlear implant surgery, their explanation is always about, if you learn to sign then it
means you are not giving the brain exposure to speech and developing those
pathways. So I'm just wondering what this theory is based on? What evidence there
is for that? So I'm just wondering, it could be that DCAL could potentially do some
research into children with implants to see whether they can acquire sign language
without damaging their speech and actually see whether the ideas that are explained
are correct, or give an evidence base.
SPEAKER: I was just wondering, I was thinking maybe there could be some
research looking at deaf children, what their life communication support needs are,
so with CSWs, subtitles in a variety of things ‑ ‑ within education and schools ‑ ‑
what actual support do they need and maybe potentially to ask for funding to ensure
that deaf children within schools can have appropriate access. So often there's lots
of campaigning that goes on to ensure that older people have access, but what
about the needs of deaf children and that will significantly impact on their lives and
their education for the future, I feel that's very important to get funding for that.
BRIGITTE MCWHINNEY: I'm wondering whether we should research the
relationship ‑ ‑ we know that there has been lots of changes in education and deaf
schools are closing and many of the children who would have gone into deaf schools
are now going to mainstream schools and I'm just wondering whether anyone has
looked into the impact of that not just academically but in terms of mental health and
contributing to society and a broader range of metrics for thinking about the actual
achievements that that deaf person can have in their life. Personally, I think that I'm
suspicious of the success of mainstreaming, but you know, maybe there are some
very valid achievements. I'm still wondering ‑ ‑ it still feels to me like many deaf
children are lonely and suffer in ways through being mainstreamed and what
happens to these ex‑ mainstreamers? Are they well? Do they have a good life?
[applause]
SPEAKER: Tania I don't know whether you would want to say something about the
first and second question?
SPEAKER: What are they?
SPEAKER: So introspection.
SPEAKER: I think what Gary is trying to say is in relation to your question, Tyron
‑ ‑ sorry, Tyron is making me laugh. And cognitive fatigue. Oh yes you want to
know who are the deaf children who are able to think for themselves and have
self‑ esteem and maybe have life successes.
I think it's kind of related to the new project that we are doing at the moment, where
we are actually assessing deaf children who are oral, who are sign language users
and also hearing children, we are giving them tasks, visual tasks, thinking, planning
their thinking and which language do they use for those tasks. Some deaf children
do sign to themselves before they get on with the tasks and oral children talk to
themselves, and so we are starting to explore how they cope with ‑ ‑ well, kind of
‑ ‑ well what strategies they have for their inner thoughts. It may be to do with
language and to do with cognition, so we do have a project that's doing that. So it is
a good starting point, I think. But of course we've only just started in March which
means we have a long way to go and we will see what happens. But I think it is on
the right track, as it were, and it will be interesting to see, as you said, to see what
styles of thinking there are and how languages are relating to cognition and how they
are able to then think about being competent and getting on well in their lives.
SPEAKER: I think Kate wants to add something as well in relation to CSWs? Yes,
the impacts of mainstream education.
KATE: First of all, just in relation to Brigitte, your question. Part of the project I'm
involved in is actually to look at the impact of mainstream effects on their identity and
self‑ esteem for example. We have involved some mainstreamers within the project,
who have deaf peers so many of them attend an unit where there are deaf peers and
they have that within the mainstream school and see they have a good sense of self
so I think it's important to compare those who are isolated from a mainstream context
and don't have that access.
Over 80 per cent of deaf children are mainstream without being in a unit, but they are
invisible to a certain extent; they are invisible to researchers. Of course we know it
will have a big effect on their identity and potentially on their self esteem, being fully
immersed where you are the only deaf person within a hearing environment. We are
trying to find them, but the question is where we find them. NEW SPEAKER: I
also wanted to say it's not just about emotional and social wellbeing, but also in
terms of how the child accesses education via a CSW, which means it's indirect
education and not direct access to the curriculum. One of my participants has said
in interview, “My CSW translates the group discussions, but she doesn't show my
personality. So how do I show my personality to these people?” So in terms of
social wellbeing and interacting with peers they find that problematic because the
CSW seems to translate what's relevant to the subject, what the teacher says in
relation to the subject, what the pupils say in relation to the subject. You don't have
the general chit chat, they don't have access to it. So yeah, that's an interesting
point. NEW SPEAKER: I think this might be the last comment from Mairead.
NEW SPEAKER: I just wanted to comment on the first question from the lady in
the pink jacket. The research that we do at DCAL does focus at one end of the
spectrum primarily at the moment. But you are right there is a lot of research looking
at glue ear, influences of that on cognition and so on, but the group you are talking
about, permanent losses, mild to moderate, are really under research group and you
are right we need to focus more on that in the future. NEW SPEAKER: I think
we'll maybe draw that to a close now. Okay, so I will pass on to Lilli, but firstly I
would like to thank all of our panel. LILLI: So the conference is now complete, I
would like to thank all of our speakers, our panel, the staff who have assisted, a
huge thank you to them for their hard work and to our interpreters and speech to text
operators and most importantly a huge thank you to you because everything that you
fed back is vital to our work and we can think about our future research. That's what
we need. When we were talking this morning about research in isolation, we need
you to work with us so you can use that research and influence you as practitioners.
Please give feedback on the blog or via twitter and we will email you a link. There
will be an evaluation form as well. NEW SPEAKER: Can we thank Lilli for her
hard work in organising this conference.
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