Syntactic and semantic processing in Hebrew readers with prelingual deafness

The experimenter investigated the effect of semantic clues on the reading comprehension of deaf and hearing Israeli children. Two groups of students with prelingual deafness, and a hearing control group, were asked to read syntactically simple and syntactically relative sentences of varying semantic plausibility. Sixteen of the participants who were deaf (mean grade 6.9) had been trained orally, using spoken language as their principal means of communication at home and at school. Another 16 students with deafness (mean grade 6.9), all of them children of deaf parents, had acquired sign language as their primary language. The mean grade of the hearing control group was 6.5. The results suggest that, in contrast to the case with hearing individuals, reading comprehension in individuals with prelingually acquired deafness, regardless of communication background, is predominantly determined by the semantic processing of content words, with only minor attention given to the processing of the syntactic structure of the text.     

Another look at the STM capacity of prelingually deafened individuals and its relation to reading comprehension

The study investigated the short-term recall of serially presented verbal(izable) information by prelingually deafened individuals and hearing individuals, and reconsidered how short-term memory (STM) is linked with their reading skills and their memory coding strategies. A computer-controlled paradigm calling for written ordered recall of 12 lists of 8 consecutively displayed Hebrew nouns was used to assess STM capacity. Forty-nine students with prelingual deafness (mean grade 6.9) and 39 hearing students (mean grade 6.5) participated in the experiment. Twenty-seven of the participants with deafness were raised according to an oral philosophy. The remaining 22 participants from the deaf group used sign language as their preferred communication code. In general, the findings suggest that neither discrepancy in the ordered short-term recall of verbal materials nor discrepancies in reading comprehension are directly assignable to differences in the memory coding strategies of prelingually deafened and hearing individuals. If such functional discrepancies develop, they reflect absent or insufficiently internalized knowledge.     

Reading comprehension and its relation to the quality of functional hearing: evidence from readers with different functional hearing abilities

Three groups of students--19 hard of hearing, 20 deaf, and a control group of 36 typically developing hearing readers--were compared on their ability to process written words at the lexical level and on their comprehension of words within the structure of a sentence. Findings generally suggested that severe prelingual hearing loss does not prevent the development of word processing strategies adequate for efficient processing of written words at the lexical level, although such hearing loss seems to put individuals at risk of failure in internalizing syntactic knowledge crucial for proper processing of words at the sentence level. Evidence further indicated that neither the amount of functional hearing (deaf vs. hard of hearing), the hearing status of their parents (hearing impaired vs. hearing), nor the use of sign language as a primary communication mode was a direct cause in this regard.     

Processing orthographic structure: associations between print and fingerspelling

Two lexical decision experiments are reported that investigate whether the same segmentation strategies are used for reading printed English words and fingerspelled words (in American Sign Language). Experiment 1 revealed that both deaf and hearing readers performed better when written words were segmented with respect to an orthographically defined syllable (the Basic Orthographic Syllable Structure [BOSS]) than with a phonologically defined syllable. Correlation analyses revealed that better deaf readers were more sensitive to orthographic syllable representations, whereas segmentation strategy did not differentiate the better hearing readers. In contrast to Experiment 1, Experiment 2 revealed better performance by deaf participants when fingerspelled words were segmented at the phonological syllable boundary. We suggest that English mouthings that often accompany fingerspelled words promote a phonological parsing preference for fingerspelled words. In addition, fingerspelling ability was significantly correlated with reading comprehension and vocabulary skills. This pattern of results indicates that the association between fingerspelling and print for adult deaf readers is not based on shared segmentation strategies. Rather, we suggest that both good readers and good fingerspellers have established strong representations of English and that fingerspelling may aid in the development and maintenance of English vocabulary.     

Homophone effects in deaf readers: evidence from lexical decision

The current study examined the nature of deaf readers’ phonological processing during online word recognition, and how this compares to similar effects in hearing individuals. Unlike many previous studies on phonological activation, we examined whether deaf readers activated phonological representations for words as opposed to pseudohomophones. Both hearing and deaf adults performed lexical decisions on homophones and control words in the context of either pseudoword foils (e.g., CLANE) or pseudohomophone foils (e.g., BRANE). As expected, hearing readers responded more slowly to homophones than to control words in both non-word contexts, reflecting phonological activation during reading. In contrast, deaf readers responded more slowly to homophones than to control words in the pseudohomophone foil context, but not in the pseudoword foil context. This finding suggests that deaf readers are able to activate phonological representations; however the nature of these representations appears to be more coarse-grained in deaf readers.     

Written language abilities in deaf Italians

Written texts produced by 10 Italian deaf native signers in four different writing tasks were analyzed. Data analysis focused on linguistic and orthographic nonstandard forms. The written production of deaf subjects with deaf parents (DD) was compared to the written production in two control groups: a group of 10 hearing subjects with deaf parents (HD) and a group of 10 subjects who have had no contact with deaf people or sign language (HH). The results duplicate findings from previous studies. Deaf subjects display a pattern of selective difficulty with Italian grammatical morphology, especially with free-standing function words. The four different writing tasks used in the present study yield results indicating that text type does influence our assessment of deaf writing abilities. A comparison of the texts written by deaf native signers with those of two hearing groups confirms the view that difficulties in the acquisition of written Italian are best explained by deafness itself, not by the influence of a previously acquired Sign Language, and that the specific difficulties with grammatical morphology displayed by our deaf subjects cannot be attributed solely to their limited experience with written Italian.     

Why do deaf participants have a lower performance than hearing participants in a visual rhyming task: a phonological hypothesis

During a visual rhyming task, deaf participants traditionally perform more poorly than hearing participants in making rhyme judgements for written words in which the rhyme and the spelling pattern are incongruent (e.g. hair/bear). It has been suggested that deaf participants’ low accuracy results from their tendency to rely on orthographic similarity. To test this interpretation more directly, we compared profoundly and prelingually deaf, orally educated participants and hearing participants’ accuracy during a visual rhyming judgement task in which the two words of a pair share the orthographic rime, in order to discourage usage of a purely orthographic strategy. Accuracy was lower in deaf than in hearing participants. The gradient of difficulty between items, together with the finding of a significant correlation between accuracy and the consistency of the grapheme to rhyme, suggest that difference in accuracy between groups might be explained by an over regularization in deaf people, which is probably linked to less diversified phonological representations.     

The relationship between reading achievement and morphological word analysis in deaf and hearing students matched for reading level

This study extends the findings of Gaustad, Kelly, Payne, and Lylak (2002), which showed that deaf college students and hearing middle school students appeared to have approximately the same morphological knowledge and word segmentation skills. Because the average grade level reading abilities for the two groups of students were also similar, those research findings suggested that deaf students' morphological development was progressing as might be expected relative to reading level. This study further examined the specific relationship between morphologically based word identification skills and reading achievement levels, as well as differences in the error patterns of deaf and hearing readers. Comparison of performance between pairs of deaf college students and hearing middle school students matched for reading achievement level shows significant superiority of younger hearing participants for skills relating especially to the meaning of derivational morphemes and roots, and the segmentation of words containing multiple types of morphemes. Group subtest comparisons and item analysis comparisons of specific morpheme knowledge and word segmentation show clear differences in the morphographic skills of hearing middle school readers over deaf college students, even though they were matched and appear to read at the same grade levels, as measured by standardized tests.     

The role of spoken and sign languages in the retention of written words by prelingually deafened native signers

The purpose of this study was to determine the nature and efficiency of the strategies used by prelingually deafened native signers for the temporary retention of written words with reference to a primary language-coding hypothesis (M. A. Shand, 1982). For the gathering of the data, participants were shown lists of serially presented written target words that they were asked to recognize according to their presentation order from within word pools that contained different types of code-specific distracter words. Three performance dimensions were examined: (a) false recognition of target words, (b) correct recognition of target words, and (c) retention of target word presentation order. Participants were prelingually deafened native signers (n=11, average grade level=8.18 [1.17]) and a hearing control group (n=25, average grade level=9.00 [0.76]). Findings from the analysis of the nature of false recognition and the number of correctly recognized words show convincingly that formationally similar distracter words interfered with the memory performance of the native signers and phonologically similar distracter words with that of the hearing control group. It was concluded that the participants decoded written words into a code reflecting their primary language experience for their temporary retention in working memory.     

语言发展前全聋学生与听力正常学生在句子表征水平上的认知比较

本研究通过启动技术比较了语言发展前全聋学生与听力正常学生在句子表征水平上的加工特点。结果表明:在限时实验条件下,语言发展前全聋学生与低于其3个年级的听力正常学生具有相同的句子表征加工模式,但加工效果与低于其3个年级的听力正常学生有差距。     

Spelling without phonology: A study of deaf and hearing children

To what extent does phonology play a role in spelling English words? The written responses of deaf students and groups of hearing children to five tasks were subjected to quantitative and qualitative analyses. The first three tasks were used to see if deaf students utilized phonology when they generated their own words and to compare their spelling performance with that of hearing subjects. The fourth and fifth tasks were designed to compare the spelling performance of deaf and hearing subjects when they were required to reproduce visually presented common words. Results showed that deaf students, who were chronologically much older, were not better spellers than hearing children from the fifth grade. Analysis of data revealed little evidence that the deaf students involved in the present study utilize phonology in spelling. Nor did word-specific visual memory for entire words appears to play a role in spelling by deaf students. Rote visual memory for letter patterns and sequences of letters within words, however, appears to play a role in the spelling by deaf students. It is concluded that sensitivity to the stochastic-dependent probabilities of letter sequences may aid spelling up to certain point but phonology is essential for spelling words whose structure is morphophonemically complex.

     

Attitudes Toward Deafness and Security of Attachment Relationships Among Young Deaf Children and Their Parents

This study investigated deaf children's "security of attachment" relationships with their hearing parents and the relationship of parental attitudes toward deafness. Subjects included 30 deaf children and their hearing parents. The children ranged in age from 20 to 60 months. Instruments used included the Attachment Q-Set, the Attitudes to Deafness Scale, and parental interviews. As a group there were no differences between security of attachment scores of deaf children toward either of their parents; however, there were marked differences within individual dyads of mother-child/father-child relationships. In addition, negative correlations were found between parents' attitudes towards deafness scores and their deaf children's security of attachment scores. Implications for the field include the importance of inclusion of fathers in attachment studies and fathers' active participation in early intervention programs. The relationship between parental attitudes toward their children's disability (deafness) and attachment relationship provides further evidence for the critical role of early intervention in the development of children with special needs.     

Assessment of Prelinguistic Behaviors in Deaf Children: Parents as Collaborators

This article begins with the rationale for a detailed assessment of prelinguistic behaviors in young deaf children. I used a Hebrew adaptation of the parent questionnaire developed by Camaioni, Caselli, Volterra, and Luchenti (1992) in Italy to collect data on a relatively large heterogeneous Israeli sample of deaf participants: 43 deaf children of hearing parents (19 girls and 24 boys) ranging in age from 8 to 49 months. Results indicated that prelinguistic behaviors in deaf infants resemble only to some extent the theoretical model of prelinguistic communication in hearing infants. Unique interrelationships emerged among pointing and early noncommunicative behaviors, yet no correlation emerged between the use of referential gestures and early words or signs. We analyzed findings with respect to the comparison of prelinguistic behavioral characteristics in hearing and deaf children and the collaboration with parents in assessing the prelinguistic behaviors of their own deaf children.     

Reading levels of Spanish deaf students

THE READING LEVELS of a population of 93 Spanish deaf students were examined. All study participants had prelingual profound hearing loss; their ages ranged from 9 to 20 years. All were enrolled in compulsory education during 2002-2003 in the Canary Islands (Spain). They were evaluated with sentence and text comprehension subtests from the Evaluation of Reading Processes of Primary Education Students, whose Spanish acronym is PROLEC (Cuetos, Rodríguez, & Ruano, 1996). A questionnaire on reading attitude was also used (Espín, 1987). Study results were consistent with those of previous research: Deaf students, at the end of their primary school education (mean age 13 years), have reading levels similar to or lower than the reading levels of hearing students at the onset of primary school education (mean age 7 years). These deaf students also have an indifferent attitude toward reading.     

Attitudes Toward Deafness and Security of Attachment Relationships Among Young Deaf Children and Their Parents

This study investigated deaf children's "security of attachment" relationships with their hearing parents and the relationship of parental attitudes toward deafness. Subjects included 30 deaf children and their hearing parents. The children ranged in age from 20 to 60 months. Instruments used included the Attachment Q-Set, the Attitudes to Deafness Scale, and parental interviews. As a group there were no differences between security of attachment scores of deaf children toward either of their parents; however, there were marked differences within individual dyads of mother–child/father–child relationships. In addition, negative correlations were found between parents' attitudes towards deafness scores and their deaf children's security of attachment scores. Implications for the field include the importance of inclusion of fathers in attachment studies and fathers' active participation in early intervention programs. The relationship between parental attitudes toward their children's disability (deafness) and attachment relationship provides further evidence for the critical role of early intervention in the development of children with special needs.     

An investigation of parents' attitudes and the communication skills of their deaf children

The reciprocity and consequences of parent-child interactions are an important subject of inquiry in child development literature. The majority of studies on deaf children with hearing parents focus on differences in parent-child interactions, which emanate from a number of factors including parental attitudes toward deafness and acceptance of alternative modes of communication. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between parental attitudes toward deafness and the communication skills of their hearing-impaired children. Whereas the majority of researchers in interactional studies have focused on mothers, both parents were included in this investigation. Significant correlations were found between fathers' scores on the Attitude to Deafness Scale and the language comprehension scores of their deaf children. No significant differences in attitudes were found between mothers and fathers. Similarly, no significant differences were found between the parents of boys and the parents of girls.     

Factors contributing to parents' selection of a communication mode to use with their deaf children

This study examines factors contributing to parents' selection of a communication mode to use with their children with hearing loss. More than 90% of children with prelingual hearing loss have normally hearing parents. Communication difficulties are among the obstacles facing these parents in connection with these children's development. Controversy over manual and aural/oral methods of communication creates further complications. Case studies of two families with deaf children were conducted to identify factors that could influence parents' selection of a communication method. Semistructured questionnaires and unstructured interviews were used in data collection. A qualitative approach was used in data analysis. Based on the results, the factors influencing parental choice were grouped under four themes: (a) the influence of information provided to parents, (b) parents' perceptions of assistive technology, (c) attitudes of service professionals and educational authorities, and (d) quality and availability of support services. Implications of these themes for service provision are discussed.     

The role of visual and phonological representations in the processing of written words by readers with diagnosed dyslexia: evidence from a working memory task

The aim of the study was to elucidate the nature and efficiency of the strategies that readers with phonological dyslexia use for temporary retention of written words in Working Memory (WM). Data was gathered through a paradigm whereby participants had to identify serially presented written (target) words from within larger word pools according to their presentation order, with word pools containing code-specific distracter (CSD) words and non-code-specific distracter (NCSD) words. Analyses focused on three aspects of performance: (1) false recognition of target words; (2) correct recognition of target words; and (3) retention of word presentation order. Participants were readers with diagnosed phonological dyslexia (n = 20, mean grade level = 9.05 [0.89]) and a control group of regular readers (n = 25, mean grade level = 9.00 [0.76]). Results provide direct evidence that the dyslexic readers and the regular readers used essentially different memory coding strategies for the temporary retention of written words, with the former predominantly relying on a visual strategy and the latter on a phonological strategy. Findings further pinpointed a notably impoverished ability of the dyslexic readers to retain word presentation order. The implication of these findings is discussed in relation to theories predicting the acquisition and mastery of reading.

The Prelingually Deaf Young Reader: A Case of Reliance on Direct Lexical Access?

A comparison was made between prelingually deaf and hearing children matched on reading age (between 7:0 and 7:11 years) in order to examine possible differences in reading performance. The deaf children all had a severe or profound hearing loss and were receiving special education in either a school or a unit for the deaf. The experimental tasks used a lexical decision task involving the reading of single words. The employment of phonology in reading was investigated by comparing reading performance on regular and irregular words and by comparing reading of homophonic versus non–homophonic nonwords. Both tasks revealed that hearing participants were much more affected by regularity and homophony, suggesting a much greater reliance on assembled phonological recoding. These results are discussed in terms of deaf readers relying on lexical access for reading print.     

The impact of visual communication on the intersubjective development of early parent-child interaction with 18- to 24-month-old deaf toddlers

This article presents a study that examined the impact of visual communication on the quality of the early interaction between deaf and hearing mothers and fathers and their deaf children aged between 18 and 24 months. Three communication mode groups of parent-deaf child dyads that differed by the use of signing and visual-tactile communication strategies were involved: (a) hearing parents communicating with their deaf child in an auditory/oral way, (b) hearing parents using total communication, and (c) deaf parents using sign language. Based on Loots and colleagues' intersubjective developmental theory, parent-deaf child interaction was analyzed according to the occurrence of intersubjectivity during free play with a standard set of toys. The data analyses indicated that the use of sign language in a sequential visual way of communication enabled the deaf parents to involve their 18- to 24-month-old deaf infants in symbolic intersubjectivity, whereas hearing parents who hold on to oral-only communication were excluded from involvement in symbolic intersubjectivity with their deaf infants. Hearing parents using total communication were more similar to deaf parents, but they still differed from deaf parents in exchanging and sharing symbolic and linguistic meaning with their deaf child.