Enacting stories, seeing worlds: Similarities and differences in the cross-cultural narrative development of linguistically isolated deaf children

The stories that children hear not only offer them a model for how to tell stories, but they also serve as a window into their cultural worlds. What w ould happen if a child were unable to hear what surrounds them? Would such children have any sense that events can be narrated and, if so, would they narrate those events in a culturally appropriate manner? To explore this qu estion, we examined children who did not have access to conventional langua ge - deaf children whose profound hearing deficits prevented them from acqu iring the language spoken around them, and whose hearing parents had not ye t exposed them to a conventional sign language. We observed 8 deaf children of hearing parents in two cultures, 4 European-American children from eith er Chicago or Philadelphia, and 4 Taiwanese children from Taipei, all of wh om invented gesture systems to communicate. All 8 children used their gestu res to recount stories, and those gestured stories were of the same types, and of the same structure, as those told by hearing children. Moreover, the deaf children seemed to produce culturally specific narrations despite the ir lack of a verbal language model, suggesting that these particular messag es are so central to the culture as to be instantiated in nonverbal as well as verbal practices. Copyright (C) 2001 S. Karger AG, Basel.