Tweny-three hearing-impaired and 25 normally hearing children between 7 and 14 years of age were administered a social decentration task, a nonsocial decentration task (a set of conservation problems), and a test of nonverbal intelligence. Although the two groups did not differ with respect to nonverbal intelligence, the hearing-impaired children obtained significantlv lower scores than their normally hearing peers on both the social and nonsocial decentration measures. Within both groups, there was a significant positive correlation between social decentration and nonsocial decentration, which is consistent with Piaget's contention that centration-decentration is a cognitive dimension underlying the structuring of both social and nonsocial content. Within the hearing-impaired sample, degree of hearing loss was not associated with either social or nonsocial decentration.
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