Deafness, Story Understanding, and Theory of Mind
Author(s): Colin D. Gray and Judith A. Hosie
Source: Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Fall 1996), pp. 217-233
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23805374
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Theoretical and Review Articles
Deafness, Story Understanding, and Theory of Mind
Colin D. Gray
Judith A. Hosie
University of Aberdeen
The results of a number of studies indicate that prelingually
deaf children raised in a spoken language environnent appear
to have difficulty in understanding and retelling stories. Vari
ous explanations have been offered: story understanding may
be impaired by lack of background knowledge and vocabu
lary; the lack of access to the phonology of spoken language
may reduce the capacity of short-term or working memory,
preventing the child from retaining story events and organiz
ing them into a meaningful interpretation; it has also been
suggested that deaf children may lack story schemata and so
cannot organize the incoming material. Other work, however,
indicates that deaf children's story production can be excel
lent when elicited and evaluated by sensitive methods that
place minimal emphasis upon English language. In this ar
ticle, we argue that, in order to understand such apparent
discrepancies, story understanding must be viewed within a
broader perspective, including considerations of theory of
mind and early socialization.
Handling fictional stories can contribute to the
emergence of an imaginative, creative attitude, to
the development of empathy, fantasy and self
involvement, as well as to the testing of models
of the world and the self (Ulich & Ulich, 1994,
p. 821).
We acknowledge the support of the Economic and Social Research Coun
cil (Grant No. R00023 6273), and we thank Dr. W. R Brown and the
anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Correspondence
should be sent to Colin D. Gray, Department of Psychology, King's Col
lege, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen AB24 2UB, Scodand, UK (e
mail: cgray@abdn.ac.uk).
Copyright © 1996 Oxford University Press. CCC 1081-4159
The story is an important aspect of a hearing child's
life. Hearing children love stories; and, if they are
lucky, they will hear many during their early years.
Telling a story is not just a way of giving a child a treat,
nor is it merely, from the parent's point of view, a con
venient soporific: The story is an important medium
through which the parent can communicate many of
the essential foundations of successful education. In
deed, long after the bedtime stories of infancy, the story
will continue to play an important role as an integral
part of the school curriculum. The experience of hear
ing and seeing a parent read a story imparts, in an
enjoyable, informal context, many important features
of language and metalanguage, enriches vocabulary and
general knowledge, and inculcates the moral qualities
that the parent wishes the child to acquire. And as the
child grows older, the complexity and subtlety of the
stories can be increased, promoting an increasingly
sophisticated Weltanschauung.
Story Comprehension: A Complex Process
The childhood story is such a familiar aspect of the ev
eryday life of the hearing child that it is easy to overlook
the complexity of the processes by which the listener
becomes involved in the action, builds up a growing ap
preciation of what is going on, and (afterwards) at
tempts to recall or to retell the story. In fact, story un
derstanding has many aspects, drawing upon a broad
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218 Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 1:4 Fall 1996
spectrum of psychological functions, the importance of The Language Problem
some of which is only just beginning to be appreciated.
Orally-trained, prelingually deaf children of hearing
parents usually fail to attain proficiency in the language
0, . , . , c ,... i-, of the hearing people around them, in either its spoken
Story comprehension in deaf children. From our own re- & v v '
, , « • j or its written form. Although the lack of spoken lan
search experience, classroom observation, and conver- ° v
sations with teachers of the deaf over a period of several SuaSe mi^ht seem
t ^ .. h j r lu i the needs of those who cannot hear human speech, deaf
years, we suggest that prelingually deal children who v '
, v ■ . • i , • » children's difficulties with written language obviously
have been raised in a spoken language environment ap- do j
, j œ u • a *. a' - • tu present a major obstacle to communication and to the
parently have difficulty m understanding stones. I he v '
r* j • r i i i . j. • i , ,-u investigation of their mental processes,
findings of several published studies with such children & v
converge upon the rather bleak conclusion that orally
schooled deaf children of hearing parents (particularly Deaf children s problems with literac
when they are young) appear to have difficulty in un- the first few years of schooling is
derstanding the main import of the stories their par- the balance from spoken to written l
ents and teachers try to communicate to them (Banks, lze on the fact that print ' makes p
Gray, & Fyfe, 1990; Gray, Banks, Fyfe, & Morris, 1992; abstraction that could hardly be pro
Donin, Doehring, & Browns, 1991). The purpose of means" (Carroll, 1974; p. 172). In t
this article is to present a more comprehensive analysis of abstraction" is expressed the powe
of the story comprehension problem than is already tbe child from confinement to what
available, with a view to reconciling the foregoing re- seen and touched and to permit con
suits with some of the more encouraging findings re- °f a rea' world beyond the child s i
ported by other authors, such as Marschark (1993), but als0 of the hypothetical and (u
Marschark and Clark (1993), and Marschark, Moura- bolic.
dian, and Halas (1994). These considerations should apply, a fortiori, to
Some aspects of story understanding extend far be- deaf children, whose world is, ab initio, narrowed by
yond the exercise of basic cognitive functions such as tbe blocking of a major information highway. For the
short-term or working memory, or even of language deaf child, learning to read should be even more liber
and phonology. The full appreciation of many stories ating than it is for hearing children. On every reading
requires the receiver to view the developing action test yet devised for use with hearing children, however,
from the different points of view of the story characters prelingually deaf children perform at a level well below
and to empathize with their varying (and often con- that of their hearing contemporaries. Moreover, the
flicting) motives. This, in turn, presupposes that the differential increases as the deaf child grows up; on
listener has developed other abilities. Some of these are hearing-standardized tests, their developmental trajec
cognitive, but others are acquired as aspects of social, tory °f performance typically levels off at a plateau
emotional, and empathie development. reading age of 8V2 years (Conrad, 1979; Trybus &
Much of the published research on the psychology Karchmer, 1977; Waters & Doehring, 1990).
of deafness has concentrated upon the academic and
cognitive abilities of deaf children, but, until very re- Decoding. Reading is a complex process, with decoding,
cently, other important aspects of their development syntactic, and semantic aspects (cf. Waters & Doehr
have been somewhat neglected. In this article, deaf ing, 1990). Expert private reading is both swift and si
children's difficulties with stories will be considered in lent. Yet there is an overwhelming body of evidence to
the light of some recent advances in developmental show that an important aspect of written word identi
psychology, with a view to exploring the way in which fication is something akin to a physically inaudible
deaf children's social development affects their re- "sounding out" of the letters (or combinations of
sponse to discourse. letters) making up a written word. By means of a
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Deaf Children's Story Understanding 219
transcoding of these visual fragments into phonological by inference in reading in its decoding, syntactic, and
fragments, followed by a rather mysterious "blending" semantic aspects. This has become known as the "top
process, the spoken word is assembled (Cossu, Ros- down" approach to reading.
sini, & Marshall, 1993; Morton & Frith, 1993). Such With this theoretical holism came new develop
segmentation and phonological reassembly has the ments and shifts of emphasis in teaching practice. Few
great advantage of enabling readers to pronounce orthodoxies succeed in totally eliminating heterodox
words they have never seen before (Ellis, 1984). Written opinions, and perhaps there never was a time when ev
language, then, exploits the phonology of the spoken ery teacher of reading subscribed wholeheartedly to
language, so that "there is good reason to suppose that the orthodoxy of phonics. Whole word, or look-and
in hearing people, written English comes to speak with say, methods, in which children are required to re
an 'inner voice', which acts as a sole, an alternative or a spond verbally to entire written words (presented on
synergistic route to meaning, depending upon the stage flash cards), rather than isolated letters, have a long, if
of development of the child and the familiarity of the peripheral, history before the sixties. In that decade,
text" (Gray, 1995, p. 6). however, phonics seemed in danger of losing its domi
nant position because of an upsurge of support and
Written language and basic cognitive processes. Although vocacy for look-and-say.
the "inner voice" and the "inner ear" are metaphors, Associated with look-and-say was a t
they receive strong empirical support from cognitive present, at any early stage, words in the
psychology (Campbell, 1992). The theory of working phrases or sentences, rather than in
memory (Baddeley, 1979; Baddeley & Hitch, 1974), down theorists also recommended an ea
and especially the role of the "articulatory loop," would tion to integrated passages, stories, and te
seem to have wide-reaching implications for reading at to encourage children to read for gist,
the coding, the syntactic, and (perhaps) even the se- Despite the persuasiveness of the argu
mantic levels. It is a reasonable surmise that, just as we top-down reading theorists and the stro
can hold a telephone number in our heads longer if we now available for the importance of infe
repeat it over and over, the articulatory loop should ing comprehension in its syntactic an
make phonological transcoding an efficient way of re- pects, empirical work does not confirm
taining sequences of visual items in memory, provided role of inference in written word-identi
the latter have pronounceable names. And this may be skilled readers; on the contrary, apparen
true whether those sequences consist of graphemes, inference in word identification is cha
the words of a sentence, or even, speculatively, a devel- poor, rather than good, readers (see Oak
oping model of the meaning of a written passage. (It is, ham, 1988, for a detailed review of the re
on the other hand, quite possible that signs also have question). By the early eighties, therefore
some kind of articulatory loop that facilitates retention research on reading comprehension in its
in an analogous way.) pects had begun to move away from purely top-down
accounts, and greater credence was being given to the
Spoken language as the basis of written language. Over the interactive-compensatory models propound
past three decades, the landscape of reading theory has such as Stanovich (1980) and Rumelhart (19
undergone considerable change. In the sixties, the pho- a decade later, the pendulum of reading th
nological emphasis in the theory and teaching of read- swung strongly back to phonology and pho
ing (the phonics approach) began to come under fire, terson, 1992).
some specialists arguing enthusiastically for the inde
pendence of the processing of written language from Deaf children's problems with English syntax.
speech processing (Baron, 1973; Barron & Baron, most salient features of the deaf child's read
1977; Goodman, 1967; Smith, 1971). Proponents of the manee profile is a marked difficulty with the
"written language" approach stressed the role played rules of English (Kyle, 1980; King & Qui
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220 Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 1:4 Fall 1996
Waters & Doehring, 1990). Although restriction of signs of any kind). Clearly, since they do not
vocabulary (particularly abstract vocabulary) is under- spoken language before they begin their schoo
standable (and usual) in deaf children, many achieve a lingually deaf children cannot be expected to ac
good level of automaticity at the word-decoding level. written language syntax in the "natural" mann
A good indicator of automaticity is the occurrence of hearing children.
Stroop interference (Stroop, 1935), which has been In view of the foregoing considerations, r
demonstrated in deaf children by Allen (1971) and by may have to be placed upon artificial routines a
Leybaert and Alegria (1993). But even the combination plicit demonstrations of principles that would
of a good vocabulary with automaticity is insufficient wise be acquired, without conscious effort
to ensure adequate syntactic processing. It is quite pos- course of natural, preschool English language u
sible to match deaf and hearing children on "reading demonstrated efficacy of visual displays in the c
age" as measured by screening instruments such as the of the reception and retelling of stories (Bank
Young test (Young, 1982), yet still have a marked mis- Fyfe, & Morris, 1991; Gray, Banks, Fyfe & Mor
match on syntax (Gaines, Mandler, & Bryant, 1981; 1992) would suggest that such methods might
Banks, Gray & Fyfe, 1990). ably be adapted for use at other levels of reading: words
It has been suggested that, in deaf readers, nonac- within sentences and letters within words, as well as
cess to phonological coding prevents strings of words representations of the conceptual structures of writ
from being retained in working memory in their origi- ten discourse.
nal order, with the result that syntactic skills cannot de- Perhaps the teaching of English syntactic rules
velop. On the other hand, the empirical basis for this is (such as those governing the production of interroga
distinctly shaky; a number of studies have shown that tive forms) can be aided by the use of display kits. In a
the usual working memory measures correlate poorly study by Fyfe, Mitchell, Gray, Ritchie, Grant, and
with reading skills (e.g., Hunt, Lunneborg, & Lewis, Banks (1993), the various sentence parts (words or
1975; Perfetti & Goldman, 1976); moreover, in studies word sequences) were carried on cards, which could be
of story recall in two samples of deaf children at manipulated according to certain rules to effect the
different levels of literacy, neither Gaines, Mandler, transformation from the declarative form of a sentenc
and Bryant (1981) nor Banks, Gray, and Fyfe (1990) to the simple yes/no interrogative form,
found any evidence of a memory problem in the written
recall of printed stories by deaf children.
There is, however, another consideration. Well be- The semantic aspect: extracting the meaning from a written
fore they come to their first formal reading lessons, passage. Although the techniques of Computer-Assisted
hearing children have acquired most of the syntactic Learning (CAL) are very promising, they cannot, by
structures of English (King & Quigley, 1985). They de- themselves, empower the deaf child to extract the
velop these naturally, in their spoken interactions with meaning from a printed story; merely making a passage
their parents and others on whom they must depend easier to read by simplifying the English does not en
to satisfy their needs. Arguably, therefore, hearing sure that the gist of the passage will be extracted
children whose coding skills are sufficiently developed (Banks, Gray, & Fyfe, 1990).
need only map the syntax of written language onto a
knowledge base already well established in their spoken
language. There is no reason to suppose that any of this Metalanguage and metacognition. The early experiences
is true of prelingually deaf children of hearing parents. of hearing children enable them also to acquire, to some
Their first linguistic experiences likely come at the degree, what is known as metalanguage. This term i
stage of nursery school, when a skilled teacher proba- not used with equal clarity by all authors. According
bly instructs them in some form of signed, or sign- to Olson and Torrance (1983), who offer perhaps the
assisted, English (though there are still strict oralist es- clearest explanation, children, having unselfcon
tablishments that have resisted the introduction of sciously used language merely as a medium for com
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Deaf Children's Story Understanding 221
municating their needs, begin to see language as a thing sign language comes with their informal contacts with
of interest in itself; language becomes, as it were, other children at school, where the official language is
opaque, another object (or set of objects) in the child's often some form of signed English (Wood, Wood,
world, distinguishable from the things to which the Griffiths, & Howarth, 1986).
language refers (the set of meanings that the language The seventies saw the first thawing of the perma
communicates). Metalanguage is a set of concepts and frost of prejudice against sign, though even today that
terms that permit the speaker to talk about language thaw is still far from complete. There were several rea
itself, rather than its content. For example, the unit of sons for this antipathy. Strict oralists held that if chil
spoken discourse is the "word." Words are grouped dren were allowed to use their hands to communicate,
into "sentences," and words themselves are often made they would turn aside from the more difficult task of
up of "parts" known as "syllables." In the hearing learning English: "[The deaf child] must not learn to
child's development, some metalinguistic knowledge is rely on silent gesture to get what he wants" (Ewing &
acquired very early indeed: "All speakers have some Ewing, 1961, p. 75). To such authorities, in fact, to
such metalanguage even if it merely discriminates talk speak of a sign language was a contradiction in terms:
from song, or prayers from curses" (Olson & Torrance, "Gestures have a place in normal communication, but
1983, p. 147). It is only through the attainment of writ- signs have not" (Ewing & Ewing, 1961, p. 75). Only
ten language (or literacy), however, that metalanguage comparatively recently has the status of sign as a true
is fully acquired. For Olson and Torrance, this is the natural language gained wider acceptance (Klima &
major developmental change that takes place in the pri- Bellugi, 1979; Kyle & Woll, 1985).
mary school years. Early experience with sign is likely to confer many
An important aspect of successful learning is a advantages upon the prelingually deaf child. F
growing knowledge of the way we learn things, as op- ample, the child can acquire early experience of
posed to what we are learning. This awareness is known versation, which, arguably, is crucial for later de
as metacognition. Metacognition is evinced by fre- ment (Peterson & Siegal, 1995). The promotion of si
quent reflective activity; efficient learners monitor their may also bring more subtle benefits. Probably ve
own progress by testing themselves in various ways. hearing people cannot tell a speech from a song o
The good reader also shows this tendency to monitor prayer from a curse. In a prelingually deaf child
progress: "Good comprehenders seem to have a better nonsigning parents, however, it is difficult to se
awareness of what comprehension is and when it has this or any other aspect of metalinguistic awaren
occurred" (Oakhill & Garnham, 1988, p. 139). Oakhill could easily be acquired. Very young hearing child
and Garnham (1988) were concerned with reading soon become aware that somehow the story they are
comprehension; metacognitive skills, however, are joying emanates from the print on the page of the
likely to be relevant in almost any learning situation, that the teller is holding, a discovery that may
including story comprehension. Facility with written tened by the solicitous reader occasionally runni
language, however, is likely to be a great boost to the finger along each word as it is read. The hearing
development of metacognitive awareness. probably acquires much metalinguistic knowle
this manner. None of this is likely to be true for prelin
gually deaf children raised in a spoken language envi
Sign language. It is well known that deaf communities ronment, who may see no reason to be motivate
have their own languages (Klima & Bellugi, 1979; mere marks on a page. And since no sound ema
Kyle & Woll, 1985; Stokoe, 1960; Stokoe, Casterline, & from the lips of their parents, lip movements m
Croneberg, 1965), examples of which are British Sign be of little interest, making it difficult, at a later
Language (BSL), American Sign Language (ASL), for the teacher to impart the phonemic signific
and Australian Sign Language (Auslan). Most prelin- the graphemes. Perhaps the acquisition of natural s
gually deaf children, however, have hearing parents language can promote the metalinguistic awa
who cannot sign. Their first experience with natural necessary to bootstrap the acquisition of English.
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222 Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 1:4 Fall 1996
Studying Story Recall true "grammars" has been seriously questioned (cf.
Oakhill & Garnham, 1988), they have proved to be us
The importance of stories has been recognized for fu] yardsticks for measuring (in recall or rete
many years, and, since they reflect to some degree the extent t0 which the main developments in
attitudes and values that obtain in the societies in been understood (Weaver, 1978; Feagan
which they are told (Levi-Strauss, 1955), they have 1984)
been of great interest to anthropologists and linguists
(Greimas, 1971; Prince, 1973). (For a review, see Stein, -phe concept of schema. So far, the term "sc
1979). Until comparatively recently, however; there had been used somewhat descriptively to indica
been few attempts to measure story recall, even with recall has a discernible structure, conform
hearing children. t0 some extent) to the characteristics descri
Stein (1979) and her collaborators. Although the ide
What is a story? The advent of "story grammarr." There has of a schema goes back to Binet (and Im
been disagreement about precisely what constitutes a the term was introduced into psychology b
"story" (Brewer & Lichtenstein, 1982; Stein & Poli- (1932), where it has had an enormous inf
crasto, 1984). It is easy to give an ostensive definition lett (1932) defined a schema as an active or
by pointing to examples of stories, and no one feels in of past reactions and experiences always o
any doubt that they know what a story is, but it is quite any well-developed organism. Bartlett s
another matter to give a formal definition. Apart from when subjects tried to recall stories, they d
the work of Bartlett (1932), stories were little used in duce imperfect imitations of the originals
psychological research for many years. It is easy to see trary, they seemed to impose their own s
why; if we cannot specify a story's structure, we have the story, to the point of adding entirely n
no yardstick with which to evaluate a subject's recall. as well as omitting aspects of the original s
Similarly, should one wish to assert that two stories are story memory is very much a product of in
of equal "complexity," or of "comparable structure," it listener, as well as of incoming information
would be difficult to sustain such a claim in the absence Bartlett provided ample evidence for the
of precise measurements of those qualities. nature of story recall, yet he offered no prec
In response to the need for more precision, Rumel- tion of a schema. The story grammar of R
hart (1975), using the work of Bartlett (1932) on story (1975) was devised with the intention of desc
recall and the literature on the structures of myths, leg- only observable story features but also th
ends, and folk tales (Propp, 1958), constructed a so- psychological structures used to encode, repre
called "story grammar" describing the general struc- retrieve story information. On that assump
ture of a story and developed a classification system. processes involved in story comprehension c
Other story grammars were developed by Mandler and principle, be studied as reflected in the "g
Johnson (1977), Stein and Glenn (1979), and Thorn- ity" of story recall. In the seventies, there wa
dyke (1977). Of the various systems, that of Stein and investigation, by those of top-down persua
her co-workers has been used most by researchers. use by hearing readers of their knowled
A story grammar defines the elements of the inter- schemata," supposed sets of expectations a
nal structure of a schematic, generic story: a setting (in ternal structures of stories derived from a
which the background and characters are introduced); experience. These investigators claime
a problem (that the main character must solve); an out- schemata enable the reader (or listener) to o
come (or resolution); and an ending, in which any loose predict incoming story information (Mand
ends are duly tied up (Stein & Glenn, 1979). Within Even though the story grammars have
this general framework, a variety of episodic structures able in research when used descriptively,
can be specified, some linear, others hierarchical, and carry assumptions that tend to obscure, rat
so on. Although the status of such story templates as to illuminate, the underlying mental proces
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Deaf Children's Story Understanding 223
recall. In some interpretations, for example, it is in the 'gaps'" (Stein, 1979, p. 269). Stein (1979) re
suggested (often implicitly) that story schemata are views a number of studies, the import of which is that
rather like rigid templates, with "gaps" that are "filled as children get older, their story recall approximates
in" with new, specific information (e.g., Stein, 1979). more and more closely to "well-formed" stories, that is,
There is here, however, a risk of the "homuncular fal- stories that conform to story-grammatical structures,
lacy," that is, the attachment of whole-human-being
predicates to parts that cannot have such capabilities
(Kenny, 1991). Often (as in Minsky, 1975, and Rumel- Story Understanding and Recall in Deaf Children
hart, 1975), the schema seems to assume two aspects,
the organizer and the organized; much as the Cartesian Because of numerous methodological difficulties, story
soul (Descartes, 1649) contemplated the representa- comprehension in deaf children has been little studied.
tions of the two retinal images in the pineal gland be- HearinS children can be told a story and asked t0 reca11
fore reconstructing the viewed object, the organizing il" 0lder children can also be asked t0 exPress their re"
schema scans the templates and selects the "right" one cal1 of the St0ryin writin&'thus ProvidinS a P™nent
for the story. But how is the selection made? How does record that the researcher can study at le,sure' But as
the listener handle a new type of story? How do the we have seen> deaf chlldren'S written lan&uaSe' even in
template schemata develop? Some would replace the their later sch°o1 years'is often insufficiently developed
notion of story schemata with the view that the listener t0 serve as a sensitive measure of understanding.
(or reader, or viewer) constructs a fresh model for every Another wa* of trying t0 ascertain whether a story
new story, rather than searching in the drawer for an has been understood is to ask the child to sign it back
old one resembling the present input. The processes t0 tbe teller and videorecord the child's versl0n'In our
by which such a model is synthesized, however, remain experience with deaf children raised in a spoken lan
unclear (Brewer, 1987; Eysenck & Keane, 1995). gUage environment, however, it is very difficult to ob
tain agreement, even among experienced teachers of
the deaf, about exactly how much of the story a child
tt a j l ■ h ij j . j j // . ■ ? has understood; the feasibility of using this method in
How well do hearing children understand and recall storiesr ' J °
The import of studies of story recall in hearing chil- the Study of St0ry Production, ho
j • _ , i i . , „ demonstrated by Marschark, Mouradian, and Halas
dren is that even at the preschool stage, they have well- J ' '
formed expectations about stories (Allen, Kertoy, (1994).
Sherblom, & Petit, 1994; Mandler, 1978; Stein &
Glenn, 1979; Thorndyke, 1977; Trabasso, Stein, Rod- Studies of the written recall of st
kin, Munger, & Baughn, 1992). Provided the sequence few published studies of the
of events in a story corresponds to the expected se- by deaf children, the main
quence, six-year-old children recall the temporal se- extent to which prelinguall
quence of story events quite accurately (Mandler & ally raised in a spoken langua
Johnson, 1977). Stein (1979) reported a similar result inferences from text fragm
with four- to five-year-old children. edge to overcome their diffic
The story grammar work thus failed to confirm the cation and English syntax
claim of Piaget (1960) that six- to eight-year-old chil- the text as a whole.
dren do not produce coherent story recall; although Gaines, Mandler, and B
Brown (1975) found preschool children less impres- tically advanced teenaged dea
sive. Stein (1979) suggested that this was because "the to write down, from mem
sequences did not correspond identically to the struc- lar complexity. In other r
ture of an expected sequence. Certain categories might differed: One was written
also have been missing, and 4-to 5-year-olds may not contained words that h
have been able to make the appropriate inferences to fill etically (e.g., "throgh")
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224 Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 1:4 Fall 1996
("thru"), and a third contained ambiguous anaphoric Other approaches to the study of deaf children's story com
noun and pronoun references (e.g., "He rode on his hension. It has been found that if prelingually deaf si
back all the way to London"). ing children are asked to sign their interpretations of
Despite no significant difference between mean written stories, they are better able to overcome their
scores of the two groups of participants on recall of the difficulties with English syntax and extract a coheren
unmodified story, the deaf children outperformed the story line (Ewoldt, 1981; Yurkowski & Ewoldt, 1986).
hearing children in their recall of both the modified sto- Referring the written text to their first language (ASL
ries. The authors suggested that, in comparison with appears to have helped them to read more selectively
hearing readers, deaf children read "with a broader re- and purposefully. This would seem to be an instance of
constructive strategy"—that is, they guess more and a positive effect, in a situation of coordinate bilingual
reconstruct the meaning from partial cues in the text ism, of the learner's first language upon semantic pro
caines, Mandler, & Bryant, 1981, p. 467). By placing cessing in her second. It also attests to the importance
greater reliance upon picking up the gist of the stories of early experience of conversation for the developmen
(even of those whose English has been modified), deaf of story understanding (cf. Peterson & Siegal, 1995).
readers can avoid being confused by altered textual The danger of performance errors being interpre
detail. ted as competence limitations is ubiquitous in psychol
In a study of deaf children (with hearing parents) ogy, and never does
whose English language was less proficient than that of trying to study c
the participants in Gaines, Mandler, and Bryant viewed through the d
(1981), Banks, Gray, and Fyfe (1990) carried out an ex- written language (K
periment in which the word order of the sentences tunately, there are ot
within one story was modified to mimic the topic- be argued that if deaf
comment sign order characteristic of natural sign lan- written stories by
guage. The sign-order condition improved the deaf quence, this shoul
children's cloze recall, indicating that, for them, the child's expressive lan
text had been made easier to read; there was no such dren receive many o
effect with the hearing controls. On the other hand, the they should be p
manipulation did not enable the deaf children to (Gray, Fyfe, & Bank
achieve better comprehension at passage level. It would been used successfull
seem, therefore, that unless they are unusually good young hearing
readers, deaf children do not generally follow a "broad Poulsen, Kintsc
reconstructive strategy" when reading stories. picture arrangement
Griffith and Ripich (1988) asked children with var- cated in a spoken lang
ying degrees of hearing impairment to retell stories. conform to the
The children's stories did have the correct story- grammatical categor
grammatical form, although many events were omitted 1991), which is cons
in the retellings. In a later study (Griffith, Ripich, & and Ripich (1988
Dastoli, 1990), the same investigators used a more fine- In a later study, h
grained analysis of story structure, as described by ment test was us
propositional analysis (Kintsch, 1977) and cohesion knowledge by deaf
analysis (Halliday & Hasan, 1976). They found that, as meaning of writ
the stories became longer, the number of incomplete Morris, 1992). The re
propositions increased. Also, the pattern of recall sug- dren evinced knowl
gested that the children were failing to keep track of story structure, th
the main story line. features which, when present in stories given to hear
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Deaf Children's Story Understanding 225
ing children, are known to add strength and salience to cated by the patterns of causal goal-action-outcome ep
the story line. isodes.
The theme of villainy, for example, is ubiq
children's stories (Botvin & Sutton-Smith, 1977
lainy usually implies the inclusion in a story o
tagonist-antagonist conflict, with a shifting vie
and an interesting emphasis upon character m
lacking in most other stories. Sensitivity to su
ments represents a degree of sophistication on
not expect in the youngest children (Bisantz, 19
comparison between picture-arrangement reco
tions of stories by deaf and hearing children s
that the theme of villainy enhanced the perfo
of the hearing children but not that of the de
confirming that the latter's sensitivity to som
features is delayed (cf. Banks, Gray, Fyfe, &
1991; Griffith & Ripich, 1988).
The import of the studies reviewed so far is t
even in circumstances wherein the linguistic d
of reception and recall are minimized, deaf ch
with hearing parents appear to be unable to
some features of stories that are known to be a
to hearing children. A somewhat inchoate structure in story recall may also
So far, all the studies considered required the parti- reflect a delay in a receiver's emotion
cipants to recall, or to retell, a story they had just re- or difficulty in empathizing with the s
ceived. The next section concerns the production of These possibilities will be explored in the
stories by deaf and hearing children.
Theory of Mind
Studies of story production by deaf children. Some compar- During the past decade, there has bee
ative studies of the production of written stories by in research examining children's u
deaf and hearing children have led researchers to con- "theory of mind." According to Premack
elude that deaf children raised in a spoken language en- (1978), who coined the phrase, one is
vironment find it relatively difficult to produce coher- theory of mind when one imputes men
ent stories (Webster, 1986; Yoshinaga-Itano & Snyder, self and to others. Moreover, "a system o
1985). Here, as with written recall of stories, it is this kind is properly viewed as a theory, f
difficult to ascertain whether the children's attempts such states are not directly observable,
reflect their linguistic difficulties, or their cognition. cause the system can be used to make
Marschark, Mouradian, and Halas (1994) used a cifically about the behaviour of other or
scheme devised by Trabasso and his associates (Tra- mack & Woodruff, 1978, p. 515). By t
basso & Nickels, 1992; Trabasso, van den Broek, & then, is meant the awareness that a sit
Suh, 1989) to compare the semantic structures of sto- look the same to another person, togethe
ries produced by deaf and hearing children in sign, ity to view the scene from someone s els
orally, and in writing. They found that signed and oral in this sense, theory of mind could b
productions had similar discourse structures as indi- "mind reading" (Happé & Frith, 1995
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226 Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 1:4 Fall 1996
Speech Act Theorists, such as Grice (1975), Austin order tasks," the latter as "second-order tasks" (Per
(1962), and Searle (1969) argued that all communica- ner& Wimmer, 1985).
tion requires both participants to take into account the An adaptation of Wimmer and Perner's first-orde
background knowledge and presuppositions of the theory of mind test, intended to minimize the demand
other person in the dialogue, as well as their intentions on S's expressive language abilities, is described by
in communicating; otherwise, a dialogue could not Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith (1985). In Baron
meet the conversational rules of pragmatics, as de- Cohen's test, the experimenter (E), sitting across a tab
scribed by Sperber and Wilson (1986). The concept of from S, shows S two dolls: Sally, with a basket in fr
theory of mind can be viewed as an extension of some of her, and Anne, with a box. Sally places a marble
of the ideas of Speech Act Theory to more general con- her basket and then gets up and leaves the room,
siderations of social, emotional, and cognitive develop- whereupon Anne reaches over and transfers the marb
ment (Baron-Cohen, 1988). Clearly, theory of mind is from Sally's basket to her own box. Sally comes bac
an essential prerequisite for the understanding of many E asks S, "Where will Sally look for her marble?"
stories, for much of the tension that gives a story its need only point to either the basket or the box. Th
appeal derives from the differing viewpoints of the theory of mind choice is the basket; the "wrong" cho
characters and the receiver's awareness of them. is the box.
There is, however, a major problem of interpreta
How can theory of mind be demonstrated? One of the most tion here: a young child, ignorant of the ad
convincing tests for theory of mind in hearing children pragmatics as described by Speech Act Th
is the false-belief paradigm developed by Wimmer and might think that E has simply asked for th
Perner (1983), in which a puppet character holds a be- tion of the marble. To exclude that possibility,
lief about the location of an object that is both wrong tice has been to ask S certain "control questi
and at variance with that of the child subject (S). In the establish that S really has understood what
original version (Wimmer & Perner, 1983: experiment asked for (Baron-Cohen, 1992). The two contr
1), the puppet, called Maxi, returns home from a shop- tions asked by Baron-Cohen were (1) "Wher
ping trip with his mother and puts some chocolate they marble really?" and (2) "Where was the ma
have bought into a cupboard. When Maxi is out play- beginning?" (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Fri
ing, his mother takes the chocolate down and returns it The first question supposedly establishes tha
to a different cupboard. S is asked, "Where will Maxi where the marble is at the moment; the secon
look for the chocolate?" Children pass the test if they that S can accurately recall the original hidi
can take into account the fact that Maxi will still think
that the chocolate is in the original cupboard, and, al- Development of theory of mind. Theory of mind develops
though this is a false belief, it will nevertheless deter- early in normal childhood. By four years of age, most
mine Maxi's behavior. This test and numerous varia- hearing children can successfully perform first-order
tions on the theme have demonstrated an important belief tasks, and by the age of nine years they can
developmental watershed reached at approximately the handle second-order tasks (Perner & Wimmer, 1985).
four-year age level (Leslie & Frith, 1988; Moore, The one exception to this general pattern in hear
Pure, & Furrow, 1990; Moses & Flavell, 1990; Perner, ing children is the developmental profile of autistic
Frith, Leslie, & Leekam, 1989). children, who rarely succeed on false-belief tasks
In all the tasks referred to so far, the child is re- (Baron-Cohen, 1992; Leslie & Frith, 1988). In fact, on
quired to show awareness of the false belief of a story such tasks, autistic children perform below the leve
character. More difficult tasks have been devised, in of normal or preschool children with similar or lower
which S is asked not directly about the belief of one verbal intelligence, children with Down's syndro
protagonist but about the belief of one protagonist (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985), and childre
about that of another. The former are known as "first- with specific language impairments (Leslie & Frith
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Theory of Mind in Deaf Children
Deaf Children's Story Understanding 227
1988; Perner et al., 1989). Apparently, therefore, for au- on the other hand, theory of mind and the pragmatic
tistic children, the difficulty lies neither in general use of language are impaired, whereas face processing
mental retardation nor in language impairment. and language remain intact.
Frith (1989) has speculated that the autistic child's
persistent failure on theory of mind tasks may have a
biological basis and may arise from a prenatal neuro
logical fault. Baron-Cohen (1992) suggests that scan- While the evidence supporting a neurological basis for
ning techniques that allow imaging of the brain during the social behavior characteristic of autism is strong,
cognitive tasks may show us where a brain dysfunction acceptance of this interpretation need not imply that
might exist. Fletcher, Happé, Frith, Baker, Dolan, theory of mind itself is necessarily modular and hard
Frackowiak, and Frith (1995) report a neuroimaging wired. It has been suggested that in autistic children
study with positron emission tomography in which the something may be amiss with the brain system respon
brain activity of normal subjects was monitored while sible for the production of joint-attentional behavior,
they performed comprehension tasks requiring the at- that is, giving, showing, pointing, and so on (Baron
tribution of mental states and tasks that did not. Only Cohen, 1992). Such behavior, arguably, is a necessary
the theory of mind task produced activation in the left but insufficient condition for true theory of mind,
medial frontal gyrus (Brodmann's area 8). The localiza- Moreover, to accept that the prevention of joint
tion of the brain regions involved in the attribution of attentional behavior inhibits theory of mind in no way
mental states, therefore, would appear feasible. pre-empts the possibility that such prevention need al
Neuropsychological theories have been proposed to ways have a neurological basis,
explain the wide range of symptoms associated with Until recently, studies of a variety of different sub
autism: poor socialization, deviant language and com- ject groups, including Down's syndrome, had found
munication skills, and repetitive social behavior. For evidence of theory of mind in all but autistic children,
example, Karmiloff-Smith, Klima, Bellugi, Grant, and The possibility of a delay in acquisition of theory of
Baron-Cohen (1995) suggest that a cognitive "module" mind for reasons other than neurological damage,
may be responsible for social cognition, especially therefore, remained only a theoretical possibility. Re
those processes relating to certain aspects of face per- cent work, however, has produced evidence to suggest
ception and theory of mind. An important aspect of the that in prelingually deaf children of hearing parents
various types of language and face-processing abilities also, the acquisition of theory of mind may be delayed,
relevant to social behavior (the pragmatic use of lan- Using a variant of Baron-Cohen's Sally-Anne false
guage, sensitivity to eye-gaze and facial expression) belief task (see below), Peterson and Siegal (1995),
is their temporal co-occurrence. According to Karmi- found that the performance of a sample of prelingually
loff-Smith et al. (1995), there exist separate, domain- deaf Australian children was not significantly better
specific predispositions for discriminating stimuli rele- than that of the autistic children tested by Baron
vant to faces, language, and theory of mind, but the Cohen, Leslie, and Frith (1985). There were two
computations in the different domains eventually give groups of subjects. The procedure for the first group
rise to a superordinate modular-like organization con- was as follows. E and an interpreter sat across a table
cerned with the pragmatics of social interaction in gen- from S. On the top of the table, on E's left, was a square
eral (cf. Brothers & Ring, 1992). In support of this the- box, beside which was a toy dog. On the right was a
ory, Karmiloff-Smith et al. (1995) adduce dissociations round basket, beside which was a doll called Sally,
among theory of mind, language, and face processing There were two trials. In the first, Sally hid a marble in
across different abnormal phenotypes. For example, in her basket and left the room, whereupon the dog trans
Down's syndrome, a serious deficit in face processing fered the marble to her box. On Sally's return, S was
and the use of morphology in language can coexist with asked, "Where will Sally look for her marble?" Then
good performance on theory of mind tasks. In autism, came two control questions: "Where is the marble
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228 Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 1:4 Fall 1996
really?" and "Where did Sally put the marble in the conversation differ in what they know and
beginning?" In the second trial, the dog placed the about a shared topic, from which it eventually bec
marble in the experimenter's pocket, but otherwise clear that people differ in what they know and th
the procedure was as before, with the same three ques- Certainly the circumstances of the children st
tions. by Peterson and Siegal (1995) would lead one to sus
The procedure for the second group was identical pect that they may h
to that used with the first group, except that instead versation in their i
of asking "Where will Sally look for her marble?" the children are likely
question became "Where will Sally look first for her tion, at least until th
marble? Peterson and Siegal (1995) describe this modi- ers in primary
fication as "conversationally-supported questioning." Howarth, 1986). Peter
Two out of 12 children passed the test with the signing, prelingually
standard questions. Seven out of 14 passed the "con- mal intelligence, 8-13
versational" version of the test. Of the 26 children in given above, could b
the study, therefore, only nine (i.e., 35%) passed either perience of convers
version of the test. (If the percentages are weighted In total commun
equally, the mean is 33%.) The children who passed teachers often com
the false-belief test were similar in age and in their gerspelling, suppl
scores on the Goodenough and Matrices tests to those movements. Some ar
who had failed the false-belief test. the total communication system may actually suppress
The success rate in the deaf group as a whole on conversational initiative: "Some exchanges which go
the theory of mind task was lower than in the Down's under the guise of conversation in classrooms suppress
syndrome children studied by Baron-Cohen, Leslie, linguistic development rather than enhance it" (Power,
and Frith (1985): 12 out of 14 of the Down's syndrome Wood, & Wood, 1990, p. 9).
children passed the belief question on both trials. Peterson and Siegal (1995) observe that autistic
(Moreover, there was no conversationally-supported children are also deprived of exposure to the social
questioning in the Baron-Cohen study.) On the other functions of language, albeit for different reasons. The
hand, the deaf children were not significantly different pragmatics of language are largely a mystery to autistic
from the 20 autistic children in Baron-Cohen, Leslie, children, who seem unable to impute mental states to
and Frith (1985), of whom 16 failed the belief question other people on the basis of what they say and do.
on both trials. Nor were they significantly different There is evidence in support of that claim from a study
from another autistic sample studied by Prior, Dahls- by Tager-Flusberg (1992), whose longitudinal investi
trom, and Squires (1990). gation of autistic children demonstrated a specific im
Peterson and Siegal (1995) suggest that deaf chil- pairment in their descriptions of epistemic states, th
dren's failure to acquire theory of mind is a direct result is, believing, knowing, dreaming, imagining, and s
of their being deprived of conversations about mental Peterson and Siegal (1995) point out that a purely n
states (cf. Olsen, 1988). Harris (1996), however, argues rological hypothesis cannot account entirely for fai
that the crucial factor in promoting awareness of to acquire an understanding of mental states and
differences in belief is not the explicit mention of the in autistic children, the lack of access to conversa
vocabulary of belief and thought; rather, children learn may combine with their neurological defects to im
from taking part in conversations that people are recip- their understanding of false belief,
ients and providers of information. Information- Apart from having difficulty with the theory
bearing conversations, which involve a continual back- mind test, the deaf children studied by Peterson a
and-forth shuttling from one viewpoint to the other, Siegal (1995) did not show any of the other sympto
serve as a constant demonstration that partners in a of autism. Nevertheless, there are other interes
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Deaf Children's Story Understanding 229
similarities between deaf and autistic children. One of reasons for suspending judgment on the crucial ques
the most striking behavioral features of childhood au- tion of whether prelingually deaf children really are de
tism is the lack of pretend play. Leslie (1987) holds that layed in their acquisition of theory of mind. Anyone
the neurological deficit associated with autism results familiar with the research supporting a stage theory,
in the inability to form, and to understand, metarepre- such as that of Piaget (1960), would be reluctant to pin
sentations, which are necessary for pretend play and faith on a single measure as an indicator of whether
for the understanding of false belief. There is evidence a specified stage has been reached. It would be highly
that deaf children also indulge in less make-believe play desirable to test deaf children on a selection of theory
(Darbyshire, 1977) and less cooperative play (Higgin- of mind tests, rather than depend on a single task as
botham & Baker, 1981) than do hearing children. Led- a touchstone.
erberg, Rosenblatt, Vandell, and Chapin (1987) argue Since, through their acquisition of sign language,
that deaf children's ability to participate in symbolic prelingually deaf children of hearing parents eventually
play depends to some extent on linguistic ability and do gain extensive conversational experience, there is
nonverbal communication skills (coordinated atten- good reason to expect that their development of theory
tion, turn-taking, facial expression, gesture, and eye of mind is delayed, rather than prevented altogether,
gaze) that facilitate pretend play. Interestingly, such Recently, some evidence has become available to sup
skills are also absent in autistic children. Moreover, port this view. Clark, Schwanenflugel, Everhart, and
deafness may result in experiential deficits in children's Bartini (1996) investigated how deaf adults of hearing
understanding of social events and in their subsequent parents rated the similarity of pairs of cognitive verbs,
ability to participate in pretence. For example, school Participants were asked to decide whether the words in a
is an important place where hearing children gain im- pair were "alike or different, based on how you would use
portant information about social behavior. However, it your mind when you do that mental activity." The results
is often the case that the education of deaf children of a multidimensional scaling analysis showed that deaf
concentrates on teaching language skills at the expense adults organized cognitive verbs according to the de
of other social skills. For hearing children, books are an gree of certainty implied by each verb; words such as
important source of information about other people's remember and memorize were located at the certainty
thoughts, motivations, and desires, but deaf children, end of the scale, whereas words like guess and estimate
being poor readers, are unlikely to gain as much infor- were at the opposite, uncertainty, pole. Verbs were also
mation about these concepts from books as do hearing organized in terms of the information processing they
children. Thus, not only are deaf children conversa- implied; words such as like and see were at the percep
tionally deprived at home but also their educational ex- tual/input end, whereas reason and estimate were at
periences are likely quite different from those of hear- the output/conceptual end. Clark et al. (1996) found
ing children. Such experiential shortfalls may give deaf that this organization of mental verbs in terms of the
children a less extensive knowledge of social situations certainty and information processing they imply is
than hearing children have. This inexperience may be consistent with data collected from hearing subjects in
reflected in inadequate representation of events and an earlier study (Schwanenflugel, Fabricius, & Noyes,
difficulty in understanding social relationships. in press, described in Clark et al.), suggesting that deaf
Interestingly, the two children with deaf parents and hearing adults have similar theories of mind,
(whose first language was Auslan) both passed the Considered with the results of the Peterson and
false-belief test. Those children, having had sign lan- Siegal (1995) study, those of Clark et al. (1996) raise
guage ab initio, would have had the conversational ex- the interesting question of whether further work in
perience Peterson and Siegal (1995) believe necessary vestigating deaf children's organization of cognitive
for the development of theory of mind. verbs would give some indication of how they come to
Although the Peterson and Siegal (1995) experi- understand the relationships among such mental verbs
ment produced an interesting result, there are several as think and know.
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230 Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 1:4 Fall 1996
Conclusion
The main import of the considerations in this article is
that story comprehension, whatever the medium
through which the story is presented, requires the abil
ity to view the emerging scenario from the varying per
spectives of the story characters, both in their cognitive
and emotional aspects.
There have been some useful investigations of the
hypothesis that lack of phonology impairs the effi
ciency of "low-level" cognitive functions such as short
term memory, with the result that prelingually deaf
children have difficulty in retaining sufficient story ma
terial for comprehension. This may also partly account
for deaf children's difficulties with syntax and other as
pects of the English language. But, a fortiori, there are
grounds for suspecting that the circumstances of the
prelingually deaf child may also result in a delay in the
acquisition of theory of mind.
The circumstances of deaf children deny them the
opportunity to interact with others and to benefit from
stories during the preschool and early school years. As
a result, the difficulties facing the deaf child who is try
ing to understand a simple story may be more broadly
based than has hitherto been supposed.
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