The Experimental Study Of Deaf Students Affected By The Semantic Classification Of The Written Word And Sign Language Picture

Semantic categorization has been one important issue in language research, due to limited phonetic message, many deaf children have difficulty in reading and their semantic categorization ability are also being delayed. Because semantic categorization has important influence on the language development of deaf children, studying the deaf children's ability in semantic categorization is of great value. This research aims at discussing whether the deaf and the hearing's ability has significant difference in semantic categorization, whether sign language and the written words have influence on semantic categorization as well as the function of phonology and semanteme of written words and the sign language in semantic categorization.This research uses the semantic categorization task and all stimulus materials are presented by E-prime software. The experiments are as follows:Experiment1adopts written words to exmine the basic concepts'semantic categorization ability of deaf children, and the way of reference consists of phonetic reference, semantic reference and unrelated reference. There are three time intervel between the reference words and the goal words:-200ms,0ms,200ms. The purpose of experimentl is to examine whether the basic concepts'categorization ability has difference between the deaf and the hearing and whether the deaf children's semantic categorization ability under phonetic reference, semantic reference and unrelated reference has significant difference. This experiment also supports the direct access hypothesis when the deaf students extract the written words.Experiment2adopts sign language picture as reference stimulus to exmine the basic concepts'semantic categorization ability of deaf children. The way of reference consists of hand figure reference, semantic reference and unrelated reference. There are three time intervel between the reference words and the goal words:-200ms,0ms,200ms. The purpose of the experiment is to examine whether the ability of semantic categorization has difference under shape reference, semantic reference and unrelated reference of sign language and whether the sign language reference and written words reference have different influence on the deaf children's semantic categorization.Experiment3adopts written words to examine the semantic categorization ability about the super-ordinate and sub-ordinate concepts of the deaf children. The way of reference consists of semantic reference and unrelated reference. There are three time intervel between the reference words and the goal words:-200ms,0ms,200ms. The difference between experiment3and experiment1is that the reference items and the goal items have taxonomy associations rather than thematic associations in experiments, the purpose is to examine whether the semantic categorization ability of the deaf students is weaker than the hearing students and whether they show asymmetry in the super-ordinate and sub-ordinate concepts'semantic categorizantion.Summarizing the experimental results and related discussions, this research supports the conclusions as follows:1. The deaf students show weaker than the hearing students whether basic level concepts'semantic categorizantion or the super-ordinate and sub-ordinate concepts' semantic categorizantion, meanwhile, the deaf students show asymmetry in the super-ordinate and sub-ordinate concepts'semantic categorizantion.2.The stimulus material affects the deaf children's achievement, they perform better under sign language interference than written words interference, The results show that using written words may underestimate deaf children's semantic categorization's ability. The results support the interactive activation model of sign language lexical access.3.The written words'phonetic sound has little influence but the hand figure of sign language has significant influence on deaf children's semantic categorization, it doesn't have influence when the interferrence words and goal words have thematic associations, but when the interferrence words and goal words have taxonomy associations, it significantly affects the deaf children's semantic categorization.