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Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 8:4 2003
© 2003 Oxford University Press

Empirical Article

Assessment of Prelinguistic Behaviors in Deaf Children: Parents as Collaborators

Esther Dromi

Tel Aviv University

This article begins with the rationale for a detailed assessment of prelinguistic behaviors in young deaf children. I used a Hebrew adaptation of the parent questionnaire developed by Camaioni, Caselli, Volterra, and Luchenti (1992) in Italy to collect data on a relatively large heterogeneous Israeli sample of deaf participants: 43 deaf children of hearing parents (19 girls and 24 boys) ranging in age from 8 to 49 months. Results indicated that prelinguistic behaviors in deaf infants resemble only to some extent the theoretical model of prelinguistic communication in hearing infants. Unique interrelationships emerged among pointing and early noncommunicative behaviors, yet no correlation emerged between the use of referential gestures and early words or signs. We analyzed findings with respect to the comparison of prelinguistic behavioral characteristics in hearing and deaf children and the collaboration with parents in assessing the prelinguistic behaviors of their own deaf children.

This article is based on my preconference presentation on language assessment in deaf children at the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development in Minneapolis, Minnesota (Dromi, 2001). Many thanks are extended to my research assistants in the Kesher Project and especially to Dalia Ringwald-Frimerman, Esther Guralnik, and Hadas Treitel for their significant contribution to the development and ongoing critical evaluation of the Kesher assessment model for the prelinguistic stage. I also wish to express my appreciation to my colleague in Rome, Dr. Luigia Camaioni, for making the original Italian version of the parent questionnaire available for us and to Dee B. Ankonina for her editorial help in the preparation of this article. Finally, I would like to acknowledge especially the invaluable assistance of Anat Zaidman, who was a real partner in making all the decisions related to the reanalyses of an old data set, and to Julia Reznik for her technical assistance in the preparation of this manuscript. All correspondence should be sent to Esther Dromi, School of Education, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Tel Aviv, Israel, 69978. Fax: 972-3-648-8571 (e-mail: dromi{at}post.tau.ac.il)

Received November 5, 2001; revised October 3, 2002; accepted October 17, 2002


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A. Zaidman-Zait and E. Dromi
Analogous and Distinctive Patterns of Prelinguistic Communication in Toddlers With and Without Hearing Loss
J Speech Lang Hear Res, October 1, 2007; 50(5): 1166 - 1180.
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