Deafness, language skills, and rehearsal: a model for the development of a memory strategy

We review a series of studies that evaluate the role of developing language skills as a prerequisite to spontaneous rehearsal use in deaf populations. We propose a theoretical model that summarizes the contribution of language skills by highlighting the interrelations among age, language proficiency, and automatized language skills. In an initial test of the model, an index of deaf children's language experience was found to be an almost complete mediator of strategy use. Increasing language proficiency, therefore, was implicated as a critical variable in predicting children's spontaneous rehearsal use, minimizing any direct contribution from age per se. In a more direct assessment of the link between general language proficiency and rehearsal use, pragmatic language skills (as measured by the Language Proficiency Profile: LPP-I) were found to be a nearly complete mediator of rehearsal use, with the remaining contributions of age and language experience being nonsignificant. Language proficiency, therefore, was identified as a strong and necessary prerequisite for rehearsal to be used spontaneously as a memory strategy. The additional hypothesis that the automatization of these general language skills, measured by a rapid automatized naming task (RAN), contributes to spontaneous rehearsal was also evaluated. Automatized language emerged as a partial mediator of the language proficiency → rehearsal use relation but additional language-processing variables were implicated. We discuss these findings as they relate to issues around the nature of language proficiency and the identification of those automatized language skills involved in rehearsal.