Phonological Coding In Chinese Characters Reading Of Deaf Subjects

During people reading Chinese characters,phonological code is used to understand the meaning of them. But whether do deaf subjects use this kind of code? In the first part,the author review some research on phonological coding of character reading from three aspects:general conception of phonological codes;phonological coding in Chinese character reading;phonological coding in character reading of deaf subjects. With reference to the review,the author holds that phonological code includes three parts:hearing code,articulatory code and linguistic code. The deaf subjects have some difficulties in using hearing code to understand the written word,but other two kinds of codes can be used to process the characters.In the second part of this dissertation,three sets of experiments are provided to verify the deaf subjects use phonological codes in reading. The first set has two experiments,which suggests us from two angles:direct measure and indirect measure,that deaf subjects have some difficulties in recognizing words,especially in words related with hearing. They have very poor abilities to use hearing code initiatively and consciously,not only in the words related with hearing,but also in the words related with vision.The second set includes five experiments which study the phonological code in word recognition:Same sound judging study;Priming effect study;Backward priming study,Free recall study;Sequence recall study. The results suggest us that deaf subjects use phonological code to recede Chinese characters. But the efficiency of deaf subjects use this kind of code depends on the task,characters used in the study,and speaking language level of subjects. Higher speaking language level,moreefficiently does deaf subjects use phonological code.The third set is used to verify that deaf subjects use phonological code in reading articles,through presenting respectively with single character and several characters in two experiments. The results suggest that deaf subjects use phonological code in reading articles. But the form of character is activated before than pronunciation of character. And efficiency of the deaf subjects using phonological code is related with reading ability of subject and form of presenting article.The findings demonstrated that phonological code is made up of three parts:hearing,articulatory,and linguistic code. The deaf subjects have difficulties in using hearing code,but they also can use other two kinds of codes. The efficiency of using phonological code in reading Chinese characters depends on several variables:task,written characters,subject variable.