Social Play Between Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children and Hearing Peers: Learning from Children and School Ecosystems
Jing Zhao, Isabel Neto, Michaela Okosi, Paulo Vaz de Carvalho, Hugo Nicolau · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26) · doi:10.1145/3772318.3791520
Summary
This CHI 2026 paper investigates how Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) children and their hearing peers engage in social play on school playgrounds, and how the surrounding school ecosystem shapes those interactions. The authors frame the work with Bronfenbrenner's ecological model of child development and the double-empathy problem, positioning accessibility as a relational, culturally-mediated achievement rather than an individual deficit. Three studies are conducted across two Portuguese schools representing contrasting cultural ecosystems. At a Partially Bilingual School (PBS), where only DHH students receive sign-language instruction and hearing students do not, the authors run a drawing-and-interview study with 19 children across three classes (DHH-only kindergarten, DHH-only primary, and an integrated class of DHH and hearing pupils) plus semi-structured interviews with 6 educators. At a Full Bilingual School (FBS), where all students learn sign language from preschool onward, the team conducts a 7-week (26-day) observation of 46 children during recess and summer playtime, coding 382 play episodes with a modified SOPARC instrument and thematic analysis. The paper synthesises the findings into a design space called Contextualized Social Play Technology with three interdependent layers - school culture, peer culture, and child agency - and articulates design principles for inclusive playground technology that moves beyond individual communication training.
Key findings
At the PBS, segregation dominated: 9 of the DHH children reported playing exclusively with other DHH peers at school, citing hearing peers' lack of sign-language fluency as the primary barrier. Hard-of-hearing children transitioning from DHH-only to mainstream classes were caught between two worlds, rejected by former Deaf classmates and not accepted by hearing classmates, producing "language and identity crises." At the FBS, play was integrated but three persistent challenges emerged: (1) diverging peer cultures - DHH children signalled interest with helping behaviours (retrieving rings in a ring-toss game) that hearing peers accepted but did not interpret as join requests; (2) communication preferences mismatched on-the-fly, with fast verbal coordination in chase games excluding DHH children unless hearing peers actively accommodated; and (3) assistive-device cultural divides - DHH children avoided jump-rope fearing cochlear-implant dislodgement while hearing peers were unaware of device fragility. Agency shifted dynamically with group composition and familiarity, not with hearing status. Facilitators included indirect friendships (friend-of-a-friend bridges), HOH children acting as bilingual mediators, and collaborative play tools (ball, jump rope) with clear low-barrier rules (96 of 382 episodes). Over the 7 weeks, DHH children's initiation rates visibly increased as shared familiarity built up.
Relevance
For accessibility practitioners designing for DHH children - or for any mixed-ability peer group - this paper reframes inclusion as work that happens at three nested levels, not just between two individuals. The Contextualized Social Play Technology framework is directly usable as a design checklist: school-level design should strengthen bilingual and bicultural infrastructure (visual concept representations, gesture-based controls, sign-language visibility); peer-level design should make cultural differences learnable and co-creatable (attention-getting norms, turn-taking scaffolds); individual-level design should rebalance agency (accessible rule explanations, detected join-bids, safe-withdrawal affordances). The finding that helping behaviours and verbal coordination systematically mismatch is a concrete design target. Limitations include a single-country (Portugal) sample, restriction to two specific school types, and only three hearing children from mainstream classes at PBS (under-representing the more integrated mixed-hearing contexts most schools actually provide). Caregivers and out-of-school play were not studied. The findings also apply cautiously to the U.S. and U.K. contexts where Deaf cultural infrastructure differs substantially.
Tags: deaf and hard of hearing · DHH children · social play · school ecosystem · peer culture · child agency · field study · bilingual education · deaf culture · inclusive education · sign language · cochlear implant · hearing aid