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These two developments, pioneered simultaneously in Spain (by Pedro Ponce de Leone and Juan Pablo Bonet), France (by Charles Michel Abbe de l’Epee), Germany (by Samuel Heinicke), Italy (by Girolamo Cardano), and later in England (by George Dalgarno), demonstrated for the first time that deaf people were not retarded and were capable of intelligent thought and communication.
The debate over thought and language was still going on in the nineteenth century. William James (1890) and both Binet and Simon (1910) took the position that thought developed before language in deaf persons; James reported abstract and metaphysical concepts in two deaf persons even when pantomime was the only language used (Moores 1982). On the other hand, Booth (1878) took the position that thought was independent of the mode of expression, and said that thought and language were separate processes, allowing a person to use one or the other alone.
In 1924-1925, the National Research Council reported that deaf subjects were between two and three years “retarded” in comparison to hearing subjects in their responses to the Pintner Non-Language Mental Test (Mykiebust & Brutton 1953). Pintner and others reviewed the available information on the intelligence of deaf persons and, in spite of sometimes contradictory results, concluded that deaf children had inferior intelligence (Pintner, Eisenson & Stanton 1941).
The work of Myklebust has been generally cited as another milestone in the history of research in deafness and attitudes toward the deaf population. His studies attributed a “concrete” nature to the intelligence of deaf persons, indicating that deafness restricts the deaf learner to a world of “concrete objects and things” (Myklebust & Brutton 1953). The influence of this attribution has been far-reaching in that educators of deaf children have for many years regarded the deaf learner as less able to work with abstract ideas; fortunately, subsequent research has proven this interpretation to be false. Nonetheless, the work of Myklebust represented at least one step forward in that he regarded the deaf learner as being at least quantitatively equal to the hearing learner, although qualitatively inferior.
Furth deplored the past centuries during which deaf people were considered to be lacking in normal intelligence because they could not speak; he thus addressed again the age-old question of the relationship between language and intelligence (Furth 1966). Furth (1964) concluded that the poorer performance of deaf persons on some cognitive tests could be explained either by a lack of world experience or by the conditions of those tasks that would favor a background of spoken language. Further, he asserted that “the deaf” can comprehend and can logically apply concepts as well as hearing persons can (1964).