3. Results
3.1. Child Pragmatics Profile
3.1.1. Clinical observation
The first Pragmatics Profiles (Appendix B) for hearing and deaf children were obtained from the clinical observations.
These were coded in three categories: (a) presence or absence of each function; (b) the modality of communication (visual/
manual or auditory/oral); and (c) the linguistic level of the child, i.e. pre-linguistic, spoken linguistic, signed linguistic.
There was variation in the frequency of occurrence of the functions across the sample (Fig. 1). Table 2 illustrates the
pragmatic functions which showed significant differences (p 0.05 and p 0.001) among the 3 groups (normal hearing,
severely deaf, profoundly deaf).
No significant differences were found between the severely deaf and profoundly deaf groups in relation to the
communicative abilities identified in the SLT observation. However, there are significant differences (p 0.05 and p 0.001)
between the two deaf groups (severe and profound) and the hearing group: the hearing children named, gave information,
anticipated situations, performed conversational repair, requested clarification and overheard conversation significantly
more often compared to the children in the deaf group.