Een meervoudige casusstudie - Divingduck.nl

Summarymodalities in which a language can be expressed: the visual-manual modality and the auraloralmodality. It has become clear that the children use both languages at the same time intheir communication with the deaf and hearing adults. This is called bimodal communication.The second result is that the children do not really mix the two languages, they use themsimultaneously and in a parallel way. The children do not start an utterance in one of thelanguages and then switch to the other language in the same utterance, like ‘code-switching’.This form of mixing of these children is defined as ‘congruent’ (Muysken, 2000). Van denBogaerde (2000) also found in her study that the language mixing of the deaf children wasmainly congruent lexicalisation. Emmorey (2005) defines it as ‘codeblends’ and not as‘codemixing’ in her study on deaf adults. The results that the children of this study show arecomparable. The communication of the children is bimodal communication instead of TotalCommunication (which is an approach to that aims to make use of a number of modes ofcommunication such as signed, oral, auditory, written and visual aids, depending on theparticular needs and abilities of the child).When the question is raised whether the fact that the children use two languages atthe same time is due to language proficiency or ‘a case of emergency’, the most plausibleconclusion is that it is a case of increasing language proficiency. The language accommodationand the increase in language proficiency are signs of that. Using two languages at the sametime is rewarding for the children. The signs are often so effective in clarification, especially inthe conversations with the hearing adults, that the goal of interaction, mutual understanding,is reached most of the time.In chapter 7 the conclusions of the study are drawn. The use of SLN can be combined with theuse of Dutch. It seems that the use of signs does not hinder the language development inDutch; it even seems to stimulate it. Although there is a positive growth in SLN and in spokenDutch, there also is a significant delay when the development of these children is compared toother children. The language development of deaf children in Dutch in not obvious, but this isthe same for the language development in SLN for deaf children of hearing parents. The qualityof and the amount of language input in SLN are important criteria. For both languages explicitinput is important to establish a healthy language acquisition.The children are dominant users of signs, but there is also language accommodation.In the conversations with the deaf and hearing adults the children mix the two languagesfrequently. The language mixing is congruent.The children become more proficient in their communication but they depend on theadults to keep the conversations going. Language and communication development is not amatter-of-course in deaf children, not even in sign language. The development depends on theinput and the way the language is offered to the children. It takes a lot of effort from theeducators of the child, parents and teachers, to let the child come into contact with language,both signed and spoken. In former days a lot of time and effort was put in teaching the deafchild to speak. Just like before, all available time and energy should be used to let the deafchild profit from input in SLN. This is not automatically the case because most deaf children355