Recognition and narration of emotional scenes in deaf children: analysis of the strategies used to organize and coordinate communicational behaviours

Emotional competence and development of deaf children have received much less attention from psychological research than the apparently more pressing issues of their linguistic development. However in last years even emotional behaviour has begun to be examined. It has been proved that facial behavior plays an important role and that even hands while signing can transmit emotion. The present study tries to examine what kind of organization among behaviours belonging to different codes, that is voice, face and sign, the deaf child has to manage to communicate emotion and if this organization differs from that of the normal hearing child in some way. For that purpose, we showed to 7 deaf and 30 hearing children two different kinds of picturial stimuli representing emotional scenes asking them to tell us the story. All performances were videotaped to analyse non verbal behaviors. Different levels of data analysis were conducted: recognition answers, non verbal behaviours, organisation of behaviours. This is an explorative and descriptive study and the number of subjects allowed mainly qualitative data analysis. For the recogniton task results show comparable levels of performance for deaf children and hearing children. Regarding non verbal behaviour deaf children seem to use lots of facial behaviours to communicate, while haering children rely mostly on verbal language. In addition, through the use of PC program THEME97, we found that while communicating the deaf child realizes a complex organization among different behaviours: voice, sign and facial expression are linked one to another through complex behavioural patterns.