The empathic mind in children with communication impairments: The case of children who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing (DHH); children with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD); and children with Specific Language Impairments (SLI)

Abstract

Being heard, being respected, being loved, belonging to a group, a family; these all reflect basic human needs which have devastating effects on a child’s development when absent. Fortunately, children are born with a large set of skills which enable them to initiate, follow, and maintain meaningful, respectful, and loving relationships with people around them; to develop, what we will call an ‘empathic mind’. Skills to share interests with others, to recognize the emotions of others, to feel what the other person feels and to empathize with them, to understand others’ thoughts and desires, are all necessities for this empathic mind. Albeit innate, these skills do not develop automatically. Children are also born with innate capacities for language development, but only social experiences and social learning will indeed activate and develop these capacities to the extent that they can be applied meaningfully and adequately within a given social or cultural context. For some children, however, these social experiences are perhaps limited, distorted, or otherwise hampered. Children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH), children with specific language impairments (SLI), or children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) all have communication impairments for one reason or another. How this affects their social learning and in turn their development of the empathic mind will be the focus of this chapter. Examining these special groups with communication impairments is not only worthwhile from a clinical perspective, but in fact can also reveal the extent to which normal development is affected by and relies on the ability and accessibility for social learning.