Deaf Children Attending Different School Environments: Sign Language Abilities and Theory of Mind

The present study examined whether full access to sign language as a medium for instruction could influence performance in Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks. Three groups of Italian participants (age range: 614 years) participated in the study: Two groups of deaf signing children and one group of hearingspeaking children. The two groups of deaf children differed only in their school environment: One group attended a school with a teaching assistant (TA; Sign Language is offered only by the TA to a single deaf child), and the other group attended a bilingual program (Italian Sign Language and Italian). Linguistic abilities and understanding of false belief were assessed using similar materials and procedures in spoken Italian with hearing children and in Italian Sign Language with deaf children. Deaf children attending the bilingual school performed significantly better than deaf children attending school with the TA in tasks assessing lexical comprehension and ToM, whereas the performance of hearing children was in between that of the two deaf groups. As for lexical production, deaf children attending the bilingual school performed significantly better than the two other groups. No significant differences were found between early and late signers or between children with deaf and hearing parents.

Tipo Pubblicazione: 
Articolo
Author or Creator: 
Tomasuolo, Elena
Valeri, Giovanni
Di Renzo, Alessio
Pasqualetti, Patrizio
Volterra, Virginia
Publisher: 
Oxford University Press,, Oxford , Regno Unito
Source: 
Journal of deaf studies and deaf education 18 (2013): 12–29. doi:10.1093/deafed/ens035
info:cnr-pdr/source/autori:Tomasuolo, Elena; Valeri, Giovanni; Di Renzo, Alessio; Pasqualetti, Patrizio; Volterra, Virginia/titolo:Deaf Children Attending Different School Environments: Sign Language Abilities and Theory of Mind/doi:10.1093/deafed/ens035/
Date: 
2013
Resource Identifier: 
http://www.cnr.it/prodotto/i/297274
https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/deafed/ens035
info:doi:10.1093/deafed/ens035
Language: 
Eng
ISTC Author: 
Ritratto di Alessio Di Renzo
Real name: