ELSA J. BLUM
BARBARA C. FIELDS
HELEN SCHARFMAN
DIANA SILBER

Over a number of years, we have had the opportunity to observe deaf infants and
their hearing and deaf parents in a therapeutic nursery at the Lexington School for
the Deaf in New York City. When the project began, we were generally interested
in understanding the unfolding of developmental processes in deaf infants and in
parent-child relationships that were doubly burdened by the child's congenital deaf-
ness and parents' responses to the diagnosis of deafness in their children. We wanted
to understand more fully how parents adapted to and coped with the unique issues
involved in rearing a deaf child and to help and support them in their efforts to foster
their child's development ( Fields, Blum, & Scharfman, in press). This study of the
symbolic play of deaf children was undertaken as a means of exploring the formation
of their symbolic capacities.

The emergence of symbolic capacities is generally viewed as the major cognitive
attainment of early childhood, paving the way for a wide range of social and aca-
demic achievements. The emergence of symbolic play provided the opportunity to
observe the development of nonlanguage symbolization in the face of delay in acqui-
sition of linguistic symbolization or acquisition of sign language rather than oral
language. Of particular interest to us was the central importance of the parent-child
relationship in symbolic development. Werner and Kaplan ( 1963) described symbol
formation as emerging within the mother-child matrix, with increasing differentia-
tion of symbol and referent. Responding in part to the dearth of research regarding

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