Visual function development in hearing and deaf infants and its importance for sign language acquisition

Abstract

The objective of this paper was to demonstrate the importence of the Visual Function in hearing neonates, compared to their deaf peers. Fifty hearing neonates were selected from 5 different maternity wards in the city of Campinas, state of São Paulo, and 4 deaf neonates were referred to us from the Hearing Loss Neurodiagnosis Clinic or from the Cepre-FCM-Unicamp (Center of Studies and Research in Rehabilitation “Prof Dr Gabriel Porto”). The Visual Function section of the ELM Scale was used (Coplan, 1983). All the hearing neonates and one deaf baby, when they were 5 months old, were able to smile, to recognize the parents, some objects and facial expressions, to track an object and to blink in view of a threatening object. The hearing and deaf babies could imitate gestures when they reached 7 months of age and started to gesture, with some regularity, when they reached the age of 11 months. The comprehension of verbal commands associated with gestures started when they were 7 months old and all of them were using it when they reached 12 months of age. Evaluating the Visual Function can provide important data about the child’s language development, since communication by signs had begun before and more frequently than speech development, in the first year of life.