The basic objective of this Master Thesis is to estimate the communication ability of pre-school children according to the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health – Children and Youth Version (ICF-CY), and the possibility of implementing a single criterion to evaluate communication ability of preschool deaf and hard-of-hearing children. To this end, the set hypotheses were cross-checked by means of quantitative and qualitative approaches. The study included 42 children, of these 21 without hearing impairment from various Ljubljana kindergartens and 21 deaf and hard-of-hearing children from the kindergarten of the Institute for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing in Ljubljana (ZGNL). Parents filled in the general questionnaire (Annex 1), intended to provide general information on the child (age, gender, hearing status, hearing aid, age at receiving the device, and language of the family). A set of tasks (Annex 2) was designed to test communication – comprehension, communication – generating messages and conversation, first in children without hearing impairment (evaluation benchmark) and then also in deaf and hard-of-hearing preschool children.
The obtained ratings of communication in deaf and hard-of-hearing children according to the ICF-CY criteria have revealed differences between hard-of-hearing and deaf children. It has turned out that communication (ability) is greatly influenced by the type of hearing aid used by the child and particularly by the age at which the child receives it. The use of Slovenian sign language in the family enabled more efficient application of it so for the needs of comprehension as well as for conveying messages.
The set of test tasks will be a useful contribution to a more objective and comparable evaluation of communication, which is part of the individualised programme of any deaf and hard-of-hearing child attending the kindergarten of the ZGNL.
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