Abstract
Hearing impaired children comprehend the meaning of words in a different way than normal children. Content words are used in two ways naming and categorization. The former means to label objects. The latter means to generalize and represent some features of objects. If hearing impaired children could use content words in the latter way, their performance in comprehending sentences would be facilitated through concept-driven processing. But as we have already stated, this is hard for them to do. Thus, we have to try to help them acquire the meaning of content words by categorization. We devised a teaching method to help hearing impaired children to make images of categories from interrogative words and to recall some content words included in the category. We showed them some pictures of objects, and they were required to call up the words relevant to the objects. They were required to generalize the features of the objects. If they could not call up the words and/or generalize the features, we taught them the correct answer and how to generalize. In this way hearing impaired children should come to understand or become aware of categorization in the meaning of content words. We aimed at teaching a strategy for understanding categories, not the category name itself. The process hearing impaired children follow in understanding interrogatives was described as follows: Step 1; Categorizing without regard for interrogatives as a cue. Step 2; Categorizing by using other words as a cue instead of interrogatives. Step 3; Distinguishing one interrogative from another. Step 4; Understanding the categories that each interrogative refers to. After achieving the 4th step, hearing impaired children became able to generalize the features of objects by using interrogatives as a cue. They also acquire categorization in the meaning of content words. We devised teaching procedures and materials to go along with these steps of understanding.
