The Study On Chinese Pragmatic Development Of 4-6 Years Old Children With Severe Hearing Impairment

Language development of children with special needs has drawn more and more attention from both linguistics and developmental psychology. Language development of special children, normal children and bi-linguistic children are the three hot spots in the field of international children's language communication.The value of language lies in its use and pragmatic capacity is a high-level goal of language development. The oversea researches focus on the following three perspectives: (1) children's pragmatic communicative acts (2) children's conversation skill (3) children's strategies in discourse. But research on pragmatic development of children with special needs in China is just on the way and nobody has ever taken children withhearing impairment as subject.Under this background, this research takes a good advantage of theresearch findings home and abroad, especially the study framework of Havard University, to make a comparison between children with hearing impairment and normal children in the communication with their own normal mothers. The researcher selects a group of children with serious deafness ranging from 4 to 6 years old, observes their interaction with mothers, whose hearing and speech ability are not damaged, and tries to find out the characteristics and patterns of language development of these special children. These children were divided into four by age (48month, 54months, 60months and 66months), while statistics of 70 normal children come from Prof. Zhou conversation data bank. The comparison about communicative acts is made in three levels: speech interchange, speech act and speech flexibility.The researcher finds that (1) As they are growing, deaf children's language capacities are on the rise, but without significant difference between by age groups of 4-6. (2) as the year goes, the proportion and ratio of speech interchange types are on the rise, and the complexity of speech interchange shows a revalant relation between children's cognition and language. (3) The speech interchanges, major speech acts and main speech flexibility all exist in the process of the mother-child interactions. The existence of communicative acts shows both the development of language and that of cognition. (4) positive relations exist among the three indexes of children with impairmrnt, and the relation between speech act and speech flexibility is more obvious. The pragmatic development of children with impairment is much slower than that of normalchildren. (5) the comparison between normal children and children with hearing impairment shows that hearing impairment handicapped the pragmatic development and the pragmatic development of children with hearing impairment is much slower than that of normal children. (6) There is a mutual influence on behavior pattern between 4-6 years old children with hearing impairment and their normal mothers during the interaction. (7) In the interaction, 4-6 years old children with hearing impairment and their normal mothers form a series of shared core communicative acts.