IT and deaf people

ABSTRACT
The ability to organize the referential content of narrative has usually been investigated as a mark of the development of discourse skills. In this study, the pragmatic use of pronominal and nominal forms of reference in written stories was considered instead as a mark of literacy development in deaf and hearing students. Participants in the study were 17 deaf high school students, 17 school-age matched hearing controls, and 16 hearing second graders (novice writers) who were asked to write a picture-story, “Frog, Where are you?” for a hearing reader who was unacquainted with it. Results revealed that deaf students appear to use the same variety of referential devices as hearing students when writing, and in most cases, these devices are used appropriately. However, the referential strategies of the deaf students were more nominal and less anaphoric than those of their hearing peers. It is concluded that the referential strategies of deaf writers are only superficially similar to those of hearing novice writers, suggesting that deaf students' referential strategies in writing are not merely the product of a delay in development of discourse skills.
Based on joint work with Irene Perondi.

BIO
Barbara Arfé is an educational psychologist with a specific interest in deafness and developmental language disorders. She studied Developmental Psychology at the University of Padova, where she completed her PhD in 2003. In 2001 she spent a period at the Department of Experimental Psychology of Oxford University to study specific language impairment and behavioural genetics under the supervision of Dorothy Bishop. In the same year, she visited the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the CNR of Rome, where she worked with Cristina Caselli and Virginia Volterra. In 2005 she moved to the University of Verona, where she is currently carrying out research on reading and writing disorders related to deafness and to language impairment. She is author of studies on deaf children's literacy development and of instruments for the assessment of deaf children's language. She is currently collaborating with the University of Padova, the Institute of Education of the University of London, and the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the CNR.