Quantitative Understanding of Deaf Children Written Form of Communication through the Use of Word Types

Abstract

Deaf children, due to the impossibility of transforming the internal speech scheme into expressive speech in mutual written communication, make maximum use of abbreviated speech schemes that determine the ability to communicate. The aim of the study is to examine the content comprehensibility and semantic level of written communication of deaf children through the number of used types oaf words in written communication, and to determine the existence of statistical significaance of differences between deaf and hearing respondents in the use of word types at the level of statistical significance p=0.001. The study was conducted on a sample of 140 respondents. The first subsample of respondents, the experimental group consisted of 70 deaf students, and the second subsample, a control group of 70 hearing students, of the same chronological age and gender. The measurement instrument “Test of understanding the written form of expression” was applied. The frequencies and percentages of responses to each of the variables used were calculated. The t-test and the F (Fisher) test were used to determine the statistical significance of the differences between deaf and hearing subjects. The results of the study showed that deaf students do not have contextual understanding and recognition of word types through testing of linguistic competence in relation to the hearing population, because 67.10% do not understand, and 10.00% of deaf students partially understand the contextual application of word types in writing textual task. Deaf students in the written form of communication use nouns (65.70%), pronouns (34.30%), verbs (45.7%), adjectives (28.60%), adverbs (22.90), prepositions (54.30%), exclamations (15.70%), particles (12.90%) and numbers (32.90%). There is a statistically significant difference between hearing and deaf respondents, in favor of hearing, in all applied types of words, except the use of verbs.