Obituary: Reuben Conrad, psychologist working with deaf children & Trustee of Deaf Studies Trust

Reuben Conrad passed away on 17 March 2020 at the age of 103.

Reuben Conrad’s studies in Psychology were interrupted by the Second World War and like many others, his career development had to wait for some years. He started work at the Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge in the 1950s and published his research on memory describing a new process of acoustic coding. In 1968, he turned to the issue of hearing loss and in systematically exploring the topic, even spent time teaching at the Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital in London. His major work on deaf children really began in the 1970s with several published studies of a new idea that internal cognitive processing required speech (particularly in tasks which involved reading) and that this finding might have implications for deaf children. 

He hypothesised that deaf children might not be able to learn to read. From 1974, this work, funded by the Medical Research Council, took him and his research team (Jim Kyle, Anne Morris, and Morag McKenzie) to almost all deaf schools and mainstream units in England and Wales. The memory tests confirmed deaf children’s lack of inner speech but also (referring to psycholinguistic theories) that deaf children might be able to use an alternative code such as sign language. 

His major work, the book, “The Deaf School Child” appeared in 1979. It challenged the field of Deaf Education because of the poor performance nationally of deaf school leavers, in speech, lip-reading and reading. A paper which followed, “Let the children choose” suggested that sign language should be an option for all deaf children in education. The work and ideas were widely shared in educational circles and created the foundation for the sign bilingual movement among teachers. The development of the academic field of Deaf Studies, which sought to understand the world from a deaf cognitive and linguistic perspective, came as a direct result of the discussion which Conrad created. 

With Conrad’s encouragement, Jim Kyle moved on to Bristol University in 1977.  Conrad was a major supporter of the first research project in 1978 (with Jim Kyle, Bencie Woll, Gloria Pullen and Peter Llewellyn-Jones) which collected video recordings of deaf people and missioners around the UK.  What people described at the time as ‘signing’ or ‘deaf and dumb gesture’ became validated as “British Sign Language”.

Conrad retired in the early 1980s but became a founding Trustee of the Deaf Studies Trust in 1984.  The name “Deaf Studies” in the Trust title preceded the setting up of the Centre for Deaf Studies at the University of Bristol and Conrad continued to support and advise.  He kept his interest in the work on sign language acquisition with the projects which the Trust undertook from 1984 onwards. 

He was an active walker and would go out on two and three day walks across the country which probably kept him fit for so long.

Throughout, Conrad’s work was careful, methodical and precise. He applied his cognitive analysis to what was a pressing educational and social problem. He challenged the thinking of the time in deaf education and opened the door to BSL for schools and teachers and parents. His work made an enormous difference to a generation of deaf children and raised the status and perception of the deaf community in the UK.

References 

Conrad R (1979) The Deaf School Child, London Harper & Row 

Conrad R (1980) Let the children choose, International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology, Volume 1, Issue 4, February, Pages 317-329 

For more detail on Conrad’s life read 

Bishop D (2016) Quality and Longevity, The Psychologist, volume 29, July, pp 578-579 

And his obituary by Dorothy Bishop: https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/reuben-conrad-1916-2020 

Prepared by

Jim Kyle, Secretary of the Deaf Studies Trust
Emeritus Professor of Deaf Studies, University of Bristol
I worked closely with Conrad in Oxford University, on the research work in the deaf schools in England and Wales from 1974 to 1977.  This was the basis of the book, “The Deaf School Child”.