An Experimental Study On Characteristics Of Deaf College Students' Phonological Awareness

The study on deaf students' phonological awareness abroad is more and earlier than that of our country. Because of the difference of objects, tasks and materials in different studies, there is no consistent conclusion if the deaf students have phonological awareness and what the characteristics is. Chinese and English have different writing and phonetic systems, so we need study to test if the study conclusion in English is suitable for the Chinese deaf students .There is little study on the phonological awareness of Chinese deaf students and the study needs to be perfected.Based on the literature analysis, this study designs two experimental tasks: one is automatically phonological activated and the other one is forced phonological activation. Thus we can inspect whether the deaf college students have phonological awareness from two aspects. By comparing with their hearing and non-verbal IQ chronological aged group, we can draw the characteristics of deaf college students' phonological awareness.In order to make the experimental materials suitable for the Chinese deaf students, this study designs the experimental materials which can know if the objects' response is based on the phonological knowledge .The experimental material is picture stimuli, which is different the traditional printed words. The study designs the experimental procedure with the standard experimental system E-Prime to study if the deaf college students have phonological awareness and what the phonological awareness characteristics is ,thus makes it possible to test the objects' response in both reaction time and accuracy with SPSS 15.0. The conclusions of this study come as follows:First, the deaf college students are phonologically confused in the Stroop effect task which can be finished without the phonological codes. The deaf college students' phonological code is automatically activated and it proves that the deaf college students have phonological awareness.Second, the deaf college students have syllable awareness. The characteristics of theirs is partly consistent with their hearing control group and their syllable awareness is significantly poorer than their hearing control group .Third, the deaf college students have rhyme awareness, The characteristics of theirs is completely consistent with their hearing control group and their rhyme awareness is significantly poorer than their hearing control group .Fourth, the deaf college students have phoneme awareness. Their phoneme awareness is significantly poorer than their hearing control group and the characteristics is changed with the difficulty of the material.Last, the deaf college students have tone awareness. The characteristics of theirs are completely consistent with their hearing control group and their tone awareness is significantly poorer than their hearing control group.