Deaf children's revision behaviors in conversations.

This study was designed to investigate school-age deaf children's responses to a listener's indication of communication breakdown and to determine if the deaf children's responses were related to their syntactic or semantic abilities and/or typical mode of communication. Subjects were 14 deaf children between the ages of 5 yr, 10 mo and 8 yr, 11 mo. Approximately once every 3 min during a 60-min conversation, the experimenter said, and simultaneously signed, "What?" The child's responses to the "What?" probe were classified as Revision, Repetition, and No Response. Revisions were categorized into eight subcategories involving changes in sentence constituents and supraconstituents. Revisions were the most frequent responses when communication broke down. Most of the children's revisions involved changes in sentence constituents. The frequency of revisions, repetitions, and no responses was related to the children's level of syntactic production.