Spoken Language Sign Language

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Sign language or spoken language for a hearing impaired child?
The parent of a hearing impaired child is charged with the task of making very important life decisions for their child, who is too young to make the choices for themselves. Therefore it is very important that the parent is well informed about the issues that surround choosing how their child communicates; whether they use sign language or spoken language. In this essay the difference between sign language and spoken language will be defined, as well as the issues that surround raising a child with only sign language or only spoken language. The positives and negatives of giving the child a bimodal bilingual education will also be discussed.
The difference between sign languages …show more content…

Besides the fact that it is the most convenient for them, some parents think that this will help their child communicate better with the general public; leading to satisfying personal relationships and unlimited career goals. Dolnick (1993) says that spoken language is an extremely challenging thing to learn for a child who has been born deaf, because they are trying without any direct feedback to copy sounds that they have never heard before. Even if the deaf child does learn to speak, lip reading is a very hard skill to learn, many words look exactly the same on the lips but sound very different. Most deaf people even in good conditions result to guessing half of what they see on the lips. “In tests using simple sentences, deaf people recognize perhaps three or four words in every ten.” (Dolnick, 1993). This form of communication is extremely hard for the deaf child, their level of language develops much slower than their peers and they end up being years behind their age group. Some deaf people never reach an adequate level of spoken language Dolnick (1993) says, to gamble 12 to 15 years of a deaf child’s life is almost …show more content…

Dolnick (1993) says that deaf children born to deaf parents learn sign language as easily as a hearing child learns spoken language from their hearing parents. Deaf children therefore develop at the same rate as hearing children when using sign language. Dolnick (1993) asked the parents of a hearing impaired child who had decided to change over to sign language with their daughter how it affected her “the improvement in her language and communication skills development since she started using sign language has been tremendous. She likes signing and we all sign with her.” However Finch (2015) states that some professionals in the field of deafness believe that if a hearing impaired child learns to use sign language, the child won’t be able to learn vocal and written language as well. As far as research goes this is the only downside to a deaf child learning sign language; that they may struggle to learn spoken

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