Cognitive Development in Young Deaf Children. Research Report No. 92.

Sixteen preschool-age hearing-impaired children were studied to explore the general nature of their cognitive development and to identify relationships between environmental processes and cognitive development. Data were obtained from administration of the Infant Psychological Development Scale and the Inventory of Home Stimulation (when Ss were 23- to 38-months old); and from administration of the Home Inventory, the Utah Test of Language Development, a structured mother-child interaction task, and a classification task (when Ss were 36- to 54-months-old). Findings revealed that the early cognitive development of deaf children through what J. Piaget terms the sensori-motor stage proceeds quite normally, but that cognitive development which is more clearly dependent on verbal interaction with the environment, or what Piaget terms social transmission, does show a discrepancy when deaf children are compared to hearing children on the classification task. Results suggested that early intervention programs with deaf children need to focus on improving communication abilities and developing curriculum materials which better teach those concepts usually transmitted through social interaction with the environment. (LS)