Prioritising pragmatics and social communication for deaf children and young people

Effective communication can be wonderful. It can connect us to family, friends, teachers, mentors, andmany others. It has the potential to enhance our immediate and long-term well-being in countless ways. However, navigating the nuances of pragmatics and social communication is not always straightforward. These skills include many subskills that require understanding, coordination, and purposeful intent, among other abilities. Learning any language means understanding how to operate in the language with other speakers or signers: keeping conversation going, checking understanding, adjusting your understanding of what the communication partner means, asking for what you want and determining the unstated but implied intention of the conversational partner. The responsiveness of the parent or conversational partner influences the success of the child in developing pragmatic skills (Di Sante et al., 2020). Deaf children often have weak pragmatic skills, perhaps because it is easier for teachers of deaf children to focus on expected development in the growth in grammar and vocabulary; pragmatic skills are harder to pin down. Another explanation from the early years could be that many parents find it more difficult to interact with a deaf child than a hearing sibling. There are many communication breakdowns, more than in conversations between a hearing mother and child. Recent research from the UK has shown the value of supporting parents of deaf children to be less directive, follow the child’s focus of attention and improve turn-taking in conversation (Curtin et al., 2021). In general, Deaf children from deaf families using signed language do not have a delay in pragmatic skills development when interacting with sign language users (Paul et al., 2020). Pragmatic skills also depend on the sociolinguistic context of the family; as the child grows, they encounter a wider range of speakers and signers with different ways of interacting. Some parents have more access to these wider settings, which can prepare their child for the different ways of talking and signing in school.