The Use of Communication Repair Strategies by Young Adult Deaf Indian Sign Language Users - A Pilot Study

Communication refers to receiving or exchanging ideas, information, signals or messages through appropriate media, enabling individuals or groups to persuade, to seek information, to give information or to express emotions. Communication breakdown or failure occurs when message is not properly perceived and conversation is interrupted. The ability to recognize and repair breakdowns in communication is an important aspect of conversational skill. In hearing impaired population, communication. Numerous western studies explore various aspects of communication breakdown in hearing impaired who are either oral communicators or American Sign Language (ASL) users. Scarcity of researches explicitly showing the use of repair strategies in adult Indian Sign Language (ISL) users exist. Hence present study tried to investigate the use of repair strategies by deaf sign language users while communicating with a hearing communication partner.30 ISL users between 17 - 21 years having severe to profound hearing loss were recruited for the study. Participants did a picture description task, they were asked to describe a picture using ISL to a sign language interpreter. Use of communication repair strategy by deaf participants in response to signed clarification request and facial expression by the interpreter was recorded and was later analyzed. study results evidenced that there was an equal frequency of usage of most of the repair strategies by deaf sign language users in our study. Combination of two or more repair strategies were used by HI population rather than relying on a single strategy. Study also indicated that the most frequently used repair strategy by ISL users is finger spelling, which occurred in combination with other repair strategies. Current study also evidenced that though body language and facial expression are key elements in ISL, the deaf ISL users did not recognize the facial expression by the interpreter as an indicator of communication breakdown.