Mental State Talk in Deaf Dyads – Parent and Infant Interaction

The presentation is part of the Swedish National Research School on Communication and Relations as Foundations for Early Childhood Education (FoRFa), funded by Swedish Research Council (grant no. 729-2013-6848). This study is... [ view full abstract ]

The presentation is part of the Swedish National Research School on Communication and Relations as Foundations for Early Childhood Education (FoRFa), funded by Swedish Research Council (grant no. 729-2013-6848).

This study is an ongoing project conducted in collaboration with Professor Erland Hjelmqvist and PhD Kerstin Falkman at Gothenburg University. It is a part of a larger, longitudinal project with the aim of focusing early communication and social interaction between 12 young deaf infants and their deaf parents and siblings.

The aim of the study presented here is to describe early social interaction between deaf infants (0-6 months of age) and their deaf parents with focus on mental state talk. The more specific purpose is to investigate how parents make reference to their infants’ own volitional states (eg. try, want, need) or what the parents presume the infants think about, e.g. mind-minded kind of talk, in these dyads in relation to the visual awareness needed in a signing setting. The literature has described parents’ mental talk and infants’ gestural communication in hearing dyads but there are to our knowledge no study describing what deaf parents talk about this early in their children’s’ lives. The current study preliminary results show that the earlier reported research describing hearing parents’ mental state talk with their hearing infants can be compared with and are much alike the interaction in deaf dyads. We suggest therefor that this may have great implications for to inform and to stimulate hearing parents with deaf babies to learn and use signs during early years even when decision have been made to operate on them with cochlear implants and later possible development of speaking. The results and this suggestion emanating from our research will be discussed in the presentation.

Keywords: deaf infants, deaf parents, mental state talk, visual awareness, Sign Language