Communicative Experience and Visually Derived Concepts: the acquisition of the concept of symmetry by oral and signing deaf and hearing children

Summary Furth's (1961) demonstration that non‐linguistic, visually derived skills established through everyday experience are adequate for concept formation rested on the superior or normal performance by deaf children on Sameness and Symmetry Discrimination Tests. This study investigates whether the skills of visual analysis (SVA) used in concept formation are derived from skills established when decoding communications. Groups of deaf signers and deaf lip‐readers and a hearing group were given a Symmetry Test with Goodness‐of‐Figure cues controlled, and an independent measure of visual analytic skills, the Coloured Progressive Matrices (CPM). All groups were equivalent on Symmetry Discrimination, suggesting that Furth's young deaf subjects had benefited from good figure cues. The deaf groups were also equivalent on the CPM, but the hearing group was superior. The tests proved uncorrelated. It was concluded that the skills acquired through sign decoding and lip‐reading, if developmentally related to concept formation, provided an equivalent basis, and that a wider range of tests would be useful for demonstrating differential SVAs and drawing conclusions on the origins of general conceptual abilities.