Research on children with normal hearing shows that the word-processed narratives they produce are better than their handwritten narratives. Hearing children come to school with prior experience in narrating stories, and in school they learn to transfer this to written narrative form. However, children who are deaf and hard of hearing have less experience with storytelling than their same-age hearing peers, and putting stories into written form is a challenge. The purpose of this study was to compare the handwritten narratives of students who are deaf or hard of hearing with their word-processed narratives to see if the benefits experienced by hearing students hold true for students who are deaf. Twenty middle-school age students were asked to provide a narrative using cartoons as stimuli for obtaining written and word-processed samples. Results were compared for length of t-unit, narrative level, and story grammar. For the subjects in this study, the word-processed samples received higher scores for length of t-unit than did the handwritten products, indicating that word-processing encourages more complete products than handwriting. Implications are discussed.
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