The effectivness of recalling information using Slovenian sign language in hearing children

Sign language is a complex and living language and at the same time represents a visual system of signs, which has its own rules and grammar. The basis for its understanding are signs made with different positions of arms and fingers, facial expressions and finger alphabet. Sign language is used by deaf and hard of hearing people and it is also useful for people with their hearing intact. Lately also parents and teachers in the kindergarten use sign language for easier communication with hearing toddlers. With the help of sign language using key words, toddlers easily express their needs. It also helps small children achieve faster speech development, better understanding, motivation for learning to speak, vocabulary expansion, concentration and social development. With the help of sign language hearing pupils can remember the subject more effectively, since they experience multisensory information. Each information has to travel through our senses before we can store it. Because our memory cannot store every piece of information that we want to remember, we use various techniques for better information storing. This research is trying to determine if memory is more effective when hearing pupils in the first triad are exposed to sign language besides the verbal information. We have created two hypotheses. The first hypothesis states that there will be a statistically significant difference between the results in immediate memorization of information given only verbally and the memorization of the information given verbally using the Slovenian sign language. The second hypothesis says that there will be a statistically significant difference after seven days between the results in the memorization of the information given only verbally and the memorization of the information given verbally using the Slovenian sign language. Thirty-two hearing pupils of the first triad of the equivalent education standard with special orientation participated. We divided them into two groups by pair equalization. They all listened to the story from the book »Quick as a Cricket« by author Audrey Wood on the video. We translated the book to Slovenian language. The control group watched the video where they were exposed to voice emphasis and natural nonverbal communication. Experimental group also watched the tape in the same conditions with a difference that they were also exposed to Slovenian sign language. The signs were used only for adjectives and animals. After watching the video the pupils individually renewed the story. Their answers were evaluated on a six-point scale. The experimental group got slightly higher results in both parts of the experiment (remembering immediately and after seven days), but the differences between the groups were not statistically significant. The results of the research are an important contribution to future exploration in the field