Deaf children and cognition

Last week I visited a family who has a deaf child aged 11. The period of language deprivation he experienced was sadly seven years because of very late diagnosis, but he is a cognitively able child. When I greeted him, I asked if he was fasting. He said no but didn’t fully understand the sign for fasting. It was Ramadan during April this year, and his mother wanted me to explain fasting as he was going to join in for half the time each day. We looked at the calendar for Ramadan, and we had the times of sunrise and sunset from the local mosque website. We saw how two additional minutes were added to the morning and two to the evening each day as the days gradually lengthen in the spring. We counted the hours from sunrise to sunset and then divided them by two. That was how long he had to fast. He realised that the time would get longer through the month. He knows the word and sign breakfast and now understands more about fasting and breaking the fast. His mum wanted to explain why Muslims fast and explained it as giving money to poor people, especially in their home country. Her son wanted to know how the money could be sent in the post, maybe it wouldn’t be safe; this led to a discussion about electronic money transfer and different currencies. This discussion was held in BSL, spoken English and Arabic, using other resources such as the calendar of sunrise and sunset and the kitchen clock, which displays prayer times. It illustrates the way science and maths talk at home is embedded in the family’s cultural context and that translanguaging practices often also include other semiotic resources. The conversation was an example of embodied cognition in that it involved attention to the clock and the table of sunrises and sunsets, a constant position in relation to where we were standing for sunrise and sunset, and moving round the room to check with concern about his grandmother back in the mother’s first country. These are the sorts of conversations that deaf children often miss out on because complex and deep conversations are often limited by a lack of parent confidence or lack of opportunities to learn and use a sign language or to develop spoken languages, including heritage ones. Background