How hearing and hearing-impaired children differentiate emergent writing from drawing

Abstract

This study compared Italian hearing-impaired and hearing preschoolers' conceptions about writing, by examining how they differentiate writing from drawing. The relationship between emergent writing and verbal language within the two groups was also considered. Twenty-three orally educated hearing-impaired children from 2 years and 10 months to 6 years of age, and 23 hearing controls, matched to the hearing-impaired participants for age, took part in this study. Children were asked to write and draw, to classify their products as writing or drawing, and to recognize what they had drawn or written. Results suggest that hearing children have an earlier understanding of the two notational forms (writing and drawing) and are able to differentiate the traits of the two symbolic systems earlier than hearing-impaired children. This understanding and the discrimination between the two different notational forms could be challenging for orally educated hearing-impaired children. However, once they have differentiated writing from drawing, hearing-impaired children can even develop more precise and stable writing representations than their hearing counterparts. Verbal language seems to be a relevant variable in this construction process.