Linguistic and extralinguistic communication in deaf children

We present a study on the linguistic and extralinguistic pragmatic abilities of deaf children. Following the tenets of Cognitive Pragmatics theory, which provides a framework for explaining differences in difficulty as regards various pragmatic phenomena, we investigate the ability to comprehend direct, indirect, deceitful, and ironic communication acts performed through linguistic and extralinguistic means. Our main prediction is that there is a gradation of difficulty in comprehending these communicative phenomena, in deaf children as well as in hearing children. This prediction is grounded on the assumptions that the construction of the meaning of a communication act is independent of both the communicative means (i.e. linguistic or extralinguistic) and the input modalities (i.e. oral or visual). Rather (as supported by previous studies on hearing children), the gradation of difficulty is determined by mental representations of different complexity and inferential chains of different loads. Our aim was to validate the predictions on (46) deaf children aged 2–4 years and 4;6–7 years. The results confirm our expectations.