Perception of the parents on pragmatic abilities of deaf children attended in hearing rehabilitation services

Abstract

Objective: To describe the pragmatic abilities of deaf children in situation of daily communication, from the perception of family members. Methods: qualitative descriptive study. It was developed with families and deaf children who attended a hearing rehabilitation service of a federal public university. It was applied with the families the First Part: Assessment of Pragmatic Profile from “Protocol for the Assessment of Communicative Abilities and Language of Deaf Children”. Analysis of the data was carried out in a table of records composed of checklist, in which it was reported the occurrence of 33 communicative abilities and the modality in which they occurred. The data were submitted to descriptive statistics and graphical analysis by STATISTICA 9.1. Results: Most of the pragmatic abilities were present in all of the studied children. The highest occurrence of skills corresponded to the “Answer to Communication” section, followed by “Communicative Intent” and finally “Interaction and Conversation”. Regarding the skills of the “Change in Context” section, most children are able to adapt the way of communication to the context they are into. From the parents’ point of view, the preferred communication mode of the children was the visual-spatial (40.3%), followed by bimodal (18.8%) and oral-aural (15.4%). Conclusion: The family members were able to describe the linguistic behavior of the deaf children. Thus, they understand that their children have communication skills and are able to establish a dialogue with an interlocutor