The Benefits of Advances in Communication for the Visual or Hearing Impaired

Language is very important for one’s development because it can affect other areas of development and is critical to a child’s future success. For many other aspects of development, including cognitive, social and psychological language is very necessary. Language occurs before the baby is even a month old. For a developing child, the biggest thing that will contribute to our eventual language development is what we hear. Very soon, as a young infant, we demonstrate a sense of language just by simply the noise, movements, and expression that we make. Within the first year of life the baby is already babbling and speaking a hand full of words in their native language. Also they are much better at comprehending simple words spoken to them around

Nature and nurture both play a significant role in language development. Language development refers to how children understand, organise, speak and use words in order to communicate at an effective, age-appropriate level (Karen Kearns, 2013, P.105). For centuries, theorists have been debating the roles of nature versus nurture. Although, each child’s language will develop at their own pace and there will be many individual differences based on culture, ethnicity, health and ability. As well as physical, social, emotional and cognitive development in which will contribute to a child’s language development.

Individuals who are deaf or are hearing impaired are faced with many problems in today’s world. There are so many tasks and activities that are done today that deaf or hearing impaired people may have difficulty doing because of there handicap. There handicap used to stop them or inhibit them from doing something that they are interested in or there friends and neighbors would do. However in today there are new and different technologies, that help the deaf and hearing impaired in the activities in which they want to participate in which is hard for them to take part in because of there handicap. Technology is used to help with everyday tasks in the lives of deaf and hearing impaired individuals. With out this new

Noted Deaf educator Tom Holcomb, in his 2010 paper, Deaf Epistemology: the deaf way of knowing, posits that the flow of knowledge is fundamentally different in hearing and Deaf cultures. That is, Deaf learners tend to collect information from direct experience or from the secondhand experiences reported to them by other Deaf persons. Hearing learners accumulate information through oral transmission, mostly in formal educational settings but also via casual social contacts. (Holcomb, 2010). Indeed one study has suggested that because formal educational settings are biased toward oral instruction. Deaf learners acquire only about 12% of the information that is available to the hearing. (DHHS, 2015)

What the deaf-blind use to communicate with each other or with other people depends on the extent of their vision and hearing loss, their educational backgrounds and what opportunities were open to them (“American Association,” 2009). Some of the methods used include tactile sign language, which is when the deaf-blind person places their hand on the signer’s hand to follow the shape and movement of the hands to understand what is being said. Face-to-face communication devices are used as well, those include a screen braille communicator, a teletypewriter that sits on a braille keyboard, a Captel that is a telephone that is connected to the computer that will caption what the caller is saying and display it on the screen (“American Association,” 2009). These inventions have helped the deaf-blind communicate so much easier, but a look at these inventions and they are large in size, they can’t be carried around as easily as a smart phone, and they sometimes can be expensive to own. On the other hand the success of videophone technology proves that it that there can be a simpler, more face-to-face, less expensive communication. Even though face-to-face communication is easily accessible to anyone who has a smartphone, those who are deaf-blind have vision loss that does not allow them to see such small

From the moment a child is born they are trying to communicate. There are different cries that a baby does for different things, the cries slowly progress into sounds and the sounds progress into word. If a child is born healthy with no auditory impairments, then this progression will happen successfully. But what about children who are born deaf or with auditory impairments? How will they learn to communicate? Or will they learn to speak or communicate in other ways?

Deaf/Hard of Hearing people can overcome many difficulties, and they are still able to communicate with others. They can communicate by using American Sign Language, fingerspelling, lip reading, gesture, or oral language. Hash (2003) mentions, “For

I believe that children with hearing loss have more trouble with literacy because they could potentially miss out on specific phonemes while listening to a conversation. Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize that words consist of syllables, onsets, rhymes, and phonemes. If the child is having difficulty with hearing phonemes, they could potentially develop a delay in literacy. If the child has learned American Sign Language as a primary language, the syntactic structure is completely different than English. American Sign Language does not have a written form of language, so when the child is developing literacy skills, they are learning a second language along with the written form.

On a global scale, there is a social lack of knowledge towards the deaf community (Irma M Munoz-Baell, 2000). Most people, including myself, have assumed that deaf people can only interact with others using sign language, due to their hearing impairments. Though, based on research, this appears to be one of the most common misconceptions made by hearing communities (Bragg, 2001). Having deficiencies in hearing systems make deaf people appear more attentive and astute in their

There are thousands of languages spoken all over the world and hundreds spoken across the United States of America, but what about the language that isn’t technically spoken? The ability to speak in order to communicate is a privilege that most forget they have. Imagine the struggle of the injustice a person was served losing their ability to hear or speak normally. It’s heartbreaking because communication is so vital to a person’s life. However, imagine a system that allows these people to communicate without much problem. This system is actually classified as its own language and it’s called Sign Language. Sign Language a language that helps many with disabilities, and those who don’t have disabilities, communicate with each other. However, despite its huge impact on the deaf community Sign Language still has some room for improvement. Just like other languages though, there isn’t just one form of sign language. There are many types and variations of sign language based on environment and location. But the most commonly used and most commonly heard of would be American Sign Language or ASL for short. For the purpose of this essay, we’ll be discussing American Sign Language.

Telecommunication Devices for the Deaf and Teletypewriters allow individuals who have a hearing loss and individuals who are struggling with a speech issue to communicate via telephone. Depending on the TTY device, the machine will display

Language is a communicative system of words and symbols unique to humans. The origins of language are still a mystery as fossil remains cannot speak. However, the rudiments of language can be inferred through studying linguistic development in children and the cognitive and communicative abilities of primates as discussed by Bridgeman (2003). This essay illustrates the skills infants have that will eventually help them to acquire language. The topics covered are firstly, the biological aspects, the contribution of the human brain to language development? Secondly, key theories of language development will be considered. Is the development innate? Is there a critical period? Thirdly, what must be learned? What are the rudiments infants must

This book count as our first book in this area. We read a small section, but it was really interesting after reading just the first section. We can say that if a person was born deaf or he/she become deaf for some reason, their life is going to be totally different. Deaf people build their own community. They feel more comfortable together. They sign and try to use their voice comfortably around each other. We think that hearing people can be judgmental and this might be the reason why some deaf people are trying so hard to read lips and not using sign language in front of a hearing person or a group of people. Trying to talk or reading lips might look easy to us but it is really hard for deaf people. They feel like they are pretending or

In America, English exists as the standard language. For that reason, it is understood that children will learn this as their primary language. However, according to the “National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders” website, “about two to three children per 1,000 are born deaf or hard of hearing”(Quick Statistics [NIDCD Health Information]) . Moreover, an article by Karen Kalivoda points out that “depending on the age of onset and the severity of the hearing loss, an individual's spoken language development may be radically affected”. Babies learn to speak by parroting the sounds around them; however, a deaf child does not hear these noises and, therefore, the child does not “develop their language” skills

It has been observed by the researcher that in public settings often the reaction to a visually impaired person is quite different then to that of a sighted person. Society seems to have a predisposed perception of the communication abilities of visually impaired people. This study hopes to establish a correlation between the perception that visually impaired people are also speech impaired when they are in a setting where they are accompanied by another person.