Deafness, Story Understanding, and Theory of Mind

Abstract

Studies indicate that prelingually deaf children raised in a spoken language environment appear to have difficulty in understanding and retelling (and recalling) stories. Various explanations have been offered: story understanding may be impaired by lack of background knowledge and vocabulary; 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 organizing them into a meaningful interpretation; deaf children may lack story schemata and so cannot organize the incoming material. Other work indicates that deaf children's story production can be excellent when elicited and evaluated by sensitive methods that place minimal emphasis upon English language. This article argues 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. The main import of the considerations in this article is that story comprehension, whatever the medium through which the story is presented, requires the ability to view the emerging scenario from the varying perspectives of the story characters, both in their cognitive and emotional speech. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)