Teaching the Child Who Is Deaf

Professor Nancy A. Tenure, MLS, MS


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Part 2: Brain Development and Language

When a baby is born, it can generally see, hear, smell and respond to touch.  The brain stem controls vital functions such as breathing until the brain can complete its "wiring".  Over the first few months of life, the brainís higher centers explode with new synapses.  Around the age of two months, for example, the motor-control centers of the brain develop to the point that infants can suddenly reach out and grab an object nearby.  By four months, the cortex begins to refine connections needed for depth perception and binocular vision.  By twelve months, the speech centers of the brain are ready to produce what is perhaps the most important moment of childhood: the first words that mark the flowering of language.

By the age of two, a childís brain contains twice as many synapses can consume twice as much energy as the brain of a normal adult.  It is amazing!  This profusion of connections enables the growing brain to be "wired and ready to learn at an incredible pace".  Over the next six years, the brain will set up the circuitry needed to learn.  Language skills are sharpest from birth to approximately age ten.  However, it is the first few early years of life that are the most precious for developing language in all children especially the child who is deaf.

Parents are usually a childís first teacher and they help their baby learn by speaking to them.  Some researchers have even described this parent ? infant interaction as "Parentese".  When the brain, however, does not receive the right information, shuts it out or cannot receive it (as with deafness), the results can be devastating.
 

"Since experience is the chief architect of the brain" reports Dr. Bruce Perry of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, "early learning experiences create a kind of template around which later brain development is organized."  For the child who is deaf, these experiences must be artificially created in an infant/early intervention program and by a skilled teacher of the deaf.  However, parent interaction and involvement are vital too.

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Page created June 25, 2001
By Peter Brown
NYSED Grant Project, "Preparation of Educational Interpreters"