What happens during early parent-child interaction for deaf children?

This project will consider differences in behavioural interaction (gesture, eye contact etc.) and neural correlates between typically-developing children and deaf infants.

Essential interaction skills develop during infancy that can affect future language development. These early communication skills can develop through parent-child interaction. Hearing parents respond to their infants using speech or vocal cues (e.g. gasps) whereas signing deaf parents may use tactile strategies to indicate interest during interaction (Kelly et al., 2020).
Compared to hearing infants with hearing parents, deaf infants with hearing parents are at significant risk of delay in early communication. Deaf infants with deaf parents are generally thought to be at less risk since many deaf parents intuitively adapt the way they communicate in ways that are helpful for deaf infants. However, relatively little is known about how this latter, relatively rare, group of infants learn to communicate. Exploring this is not only interesting in its own right, it has the potential to help us support deaf infants more generally. Results may affect how therapy is delivered and how deaf children are treated as a clinical population.

This project will have 3 parts:
Part 1 considers behavioural observations during parent-child interaction for both deaf and hearing children. The deaf children can be further divided into children whose parents are also deaf, and children with hearing parents. This project will explore a range of communicative skills on the part of the parent or infant by looking at differences in gaze, facial expression, vocalisation, action, gesture.
Part 2 considers the underlying neural correlates during parent-child interaction using EEG.
Part 3 (depending on the outcomes of study 1 and 2, time and resources) will use therapy interventions to research how deaf and hearing children respond to different techniques. This could influence future clinical decisions when deciding what approach is best for deaf children. I am a qualified Speech and Language Therapist and therefore trained to carry out said therapy.

Methods: Sample groups to include: - parents of deaf children - Deaf infants - Parents of normal hearing children - Normal hearing infants.
Study 1: Parent and child will be observed interacting in a neutral location with a range of consistent age-appropriate toys. Researchers will make notes of various interactions such as eye contact, touch, joint attention as well as the ways both parent and child may use to engage the other. EEG may be used simultaneously for part 2 to observe underlying neural activity during the interaction.
Part 3 will involve using age-appropriate language assessments e.g. TALC 1, Derbyshire Language Scheme, and therapy techniques to consider the child's language and compare how different groups perform on the tasks.