The Effects Of Oral Language Experience And Reading Ability On The Activation Of Glyphs, Phonics And Sign Language Representations In Hearing-impaired College Students

The cognitive processing mechanism of visual word recognition in hearing-impaired readers has always been a hot topic.Compared with hearing readers,due to the limited ability of hearingimpaired readers to access spoken language,orthographic information and phonological information may play different roles in the word recognition process of hearing-impaired readers.As a communication mode for the hearing-impaired readers,sign language may also affect their word recognition.Model of Reading Vocabulary Acquisition for Deaf Children holds that hearingimpaired children access semantics by sign language representation at the early stage of written vocabulary acquisition.With the increase of reading experience and improvement of reading ability,hearing-impaired readers will rely more on orthographic representation,gradually develop phonological representation,and reduce the dependence on sign language representation.In order to verify this opinion,a large number of studies have examined the activation of orthographic representation,phonological representation and sign language representation during visual word recognition,and proposed corresponding cognitive models to describe the word recognition process of the hearing-impaired readers.However,most of these studies are based on findings from alphabetic writing systems,and most of studies did not control the oral language experience and reading ability of hearing-impaired readers due to the large individual differences,leading to inconsistent conclusions.As a kind of logographic scripts,the mapping relationships between visual word and pronunciation,visual word and semantics of Chinese are different from those of English.Therefore,the word recognition process of Chinese hearing-impaired readers is an important aspect worth exploring.Based on the cognitive model of visual word recognition from alphabetic words in the hearingimpaired readers,the present study used three studies and five experiments to explore the role of orthographic representation,phonological representation and sign language representation during visual word recognition in hearing impaired college students.In order to investigate the above questions,this study investigated the oral language experience and reading ability of hearingimpaired college students.In order to better control the individual differences,according to their percentage of oral language experience and reading fluency,hearing-impaired college students can be divided into deaf college students with more oral language experience and skilled reading ability(OHRH),deaf college students with less oral language experience but skilled reading ability(OLRH)and deaf college students with less oral language experience and less-skilled reading ability(OLRL).Previous researches about phonological information whether play a role during reading in hearing-impaired students is still controversial,the present study first used the tongue twisters as experimental material to examine the role of phonological information during sentence reading in the above three groups of hearing-impaired college students,which further clarify the effects of oral experience and reading ability on phonological activation during sentence reading in hearing-impaired college students.Secondly,in order to investigate whether the hearingimpaired readers develop different visual word recognition process from the hearing readers,the present study examined the activation of orthographic representation,phonological representation and sign language representation during visual word recognition in the above three groups of hearing-impaired college students.In study 2,we investigated the activation of the orthographic representation and phonological representation,and the activation of the sign language representation,respectively,in study 3,considering that the orthographic representation and phonological representation play an important role in word recognition for hearing readers,sign language representation is a phenomenon unique to hearing-impaired readers.The first study used a tongue twister sentence reading task to further clarify the impact of oral language experience and reading ability on phonological activation during sentence reading for hearing-impaired college students.Experiment 1 adopted a mixed design of 3(group: OHRH,OLRH,OLRL)× 2(sentence type: tongue twister,control).The tongue twisters and control sentences used the materials in the research of Yan et al.(2017).The results showed that(a)the tongue-twister effects were observed in three groups,compared with control sentences,the reading speed of tongue twisters were slower,(b)the tongue-twister effect during sentence reading for OHRH hearing-impaired college students was greater than that for OLRH hearing-impaired college students,(c)the tongue-twister effect of OLRH was greater than the tongue-twister effect of OLRL hearing-impaired college students.These findings showed that oral language experience and reading ability influence phonological activation during sentence reading for the hearingimpaired college students.In the second study,two experiments were conducted to investigate the activation of orthographic representation and phonological representation during visual word recognition in hearing-impaired college students with different oral language experience and different reading abilities from two aspects: lexical decision task and sentence reading task.Experiment 2 adopted a mixed design of 4(group: Hearing,OHRH,OLRH,OLRL)× 4(test character type: target,orthographically similar distractor,homophone distractors,unrelated distractors).Participants were presented with cue words and test characters successively,and made semantically related judgment.By comparing the response time and accuracy of orthographically similar distractors with unrelated distractors,homophone distractors with unrelated distractors,we investigated the activation of orthographic representation and phonological representation during word recognition.The results showed that(a)Hearing students showed a stable orthographic interference effect,while the phonological interference effect was weak,(b)OLRH group and the OHRH group had similar performances,both showed a stable orthographic interference effect,but did not show a significant phonological interference effect,(c)the performance of the OLRH group and the OLRL group was similar,and both showed a stable orthographic interference effect,but no phonological interference effect,and the results of correlation analysis also showed that there was no significant correlation between orthographic interference effect and reading fluency.In Experiment 3,we adopted a mixed design of 4(group: Hearing,OHRH,OLRH,OLRL)× 4(target character type: correctly-spelled,orthographically similar substitute,homophone substitute,unrelated substitute).The error interruption paradigm was used,and participants' eye movements were recorded as they silently read sentences containing correctly-spelled target characters,orthographically similar substitute characters,homophone substitute characters and unrelated substitute characters,and asked them to perform sentence reading comprehension.By comparing the fixation time on orthographically similar condition and unrelated condition,homophone condition and unrelated condition to examine the activation of orthographic representation and phonological representation in the context of sentences.The results showed that(a)Hearing students activated stable orthographic and phonological representations.The orthographic benefit effect was observed in the early measures and late measures,while the phonological benefit effect was observed in the late measures,(b)the OLRH group and the OHRH group had different performances,both groups activated the orthographic representation in the context of sentences,but only the OHRH group activated the phonological representation in the late stage of lexical processing,the OLRH group did not activate phonological representation in sentence context,(c)the OLRH group and the OLRL group had similar performance,both groups activated the orthographic representation in sentence context reading,but neither activated the phonological representation,(d)sentence context predictability promoted the activation of the orthographic representation for the OLRH group,but did not affect the activation of the orthographic representation for the OLRL group.Based on the two experiments above,the second study showed that oral language experience affected the activation of phonological representation during word recognition,but did not affect the activation of orthographic representation.Reading ability did not affect the activation of orthographic representation during word recognition,but the orthographic representation of OLRH group was more stable,it may be that the OLRH group could use predictive context for word recognition during sentence reading.The third study used the same experimental task and paradigm as the second study to investigate the activation of sign language representation during visual word recognition in hearing-impaired college students with different oral language experiences and different reading abilities.Experiment 4 adopted a mixed design of 4(group: Hearing,OHRH,OLRH,OLRL)×2(sign language related type: related,unrelated).Participants were presented with priming words and target words successively and made semantically related judgment.In order to investigate the activation of sign language representation during word recognition,we compared the response time and accuracy in the sign language related condition and the sign language unrelated condition.The results showed that(a)Hearing students did not show a sign language interference effect,(b)the OLRH group and the OHRH group had different performances,the OLRH group exhibited sign language interference effects,while the sign language interference effect was absent in the OHRH group,(c)the performance of the OLRH group and the OLRL group was similar,and both showed a stable sign language interference effect,the correlation analysis results also showed that there was no significant correlation between the sign language interference effect and reading fluency.In Experiment 5,we adopted a mixed design of 4(group: Hearing,OHRH,OLRH,OLRL)× 3(target word type: correctly-spelled,sign language related substitute,sign language unrelated substitute).The error interruption paradigm was used.Participants' eye movements were recorded as they silently read sentences containing the correct target word,sign language-related substitute words,and sign language-unrelated substitute words,and asked them to perform sentence reading comprehension.By comparing fixation times on sign language related condition and sign language unrelated condition to examine the activation of sign language representation in the context of sentences.The results showed that(a)Hearing students did not activate sign language representation,(b)the OLRH group performed differently from the OHRH group,the OLRH group activated sign language representation,while the OHRH group did not activate sign language representation in the sentence context,(c)the OLRH group performed similarly to the OLRL group,both groups activated sign language representation in sentence context reading,but the OLRH group had more stable activation of sign language representation,sign language representation were activated during the early stage of lexical processing and the late stage of lexical processing in the OLRH group,while the OLRL group activated sign language representation only in the early processing of lexical processing,(d)sentence context predictability promoted the activation of sign language representation for the OLRH group,but did not affect the activation of the sign language representation for the OLRL group.Based on the two experiments above,the third study showed that oral language experience affected the activation of sign language representation during word recognition.Reading ability did not affect the activation of sign language representation during word recognition,but the sign language representation of higher reading ability deaf college students was more stable.Taken together,the following conclusions were drawn from the three studies:First,oral language experience and reading ability affect the phonological activation during sentence reading for the hearing-impaired college students,which suggests that the cognitive processing mechanisms of hearing-impaired college students with different oral experience and reading abilities may also be different.Second,the cognitive mechanism of visual words recognition in the hearing-impaired college students with more oral language experience is similar with that of the hearing readers.They can activate stable orthographic representation and phonological representation during visual word recognition,but phonological representation is activated during the late stage of lexical processing.Third,hearing-impaired college students with less oral language experience have developed different cognitive mechanism from that of the hearing readers.They can activate stable orthographic representation and sign language representation during visual word recognition,and sign language representation is activated during the early and late stage of lexical processing.With the improvement of reading ability,the hearing-impaired college students with skilled reading ability did not develop stable phonological representation,but the activation of orthographic representation and sign language representation are more stable during visual word recognition.This may be because the hearing-impaired college students with skilled reading ability can make more use of contextual prediction for word recognition processing during sentence reading,compared to the hearing-impaired college students with less-skilled reading ability.Last,based on the results of this study,combined with the representation and processing models of Chinese word recognition,the present study attempts to construct a cognitive model of Chinese word recognition in hearing-impaired college students.