A Contrasting Investigation Of The Phonological Processing On Visual Chinese Word Recognition In Deaf And Hearing Participants

Word recognition is increasingly becoming an significant research aspect for its crucial function in the language processing. The focus of the research field lies in whether the phonological processing plays an important role in the written word recognition or not. For the hearing people, researchers mainly hold three different opinions. Direct Access Model emphasizes the direct link between the orthography and the semantic meanings, thus not involving the phonological processing. However,Phonological Mediation Model attains the opposite idea and Dual Route Cascaded Model integrates both the theories. Besides, the latter model indicates that different factors could lead to the different options.As regards the deaf individuals, it is well-established that some of them are sensitive to phonological information from modalities other than audition(e.g. speech-reading or cued speech), though the hearing impairments. Just like the studies of the word recognition in hearing people, whether the phonological processing is necessary for deaf people remains controversial among many researches.The present study used ERP to contrast visual Chinese word recognition in the deaf subjects to a group of the hearing ones with the word-picture matching task. We investigated the time course and influences of the onset, rime and tone in the process.As a result, we could further analyze the role of the phonological processing during the whole course.We argue that, As for the typical ones, the greater N200 effect were evoked in the rime mismatching condition than other conditions. Significant differences on the early N400 and LPC between the matching condition and mismatching conditions were observed. In addition, we also found significant differences on the LPC among the four mismatching conditions. All above support the opinion of Phonological Mediation Model and suggest the hearing ones often apply both the top-down and bottom-upinteractive approaches. What’s more, the rime plays the most vital role and is activated firstly between different phonological structures during the process.The absence of the N200 and subtle differences on the early N400 and LPC among four mismatching types in deaf individuals support the idea of Direct Access Model,indicating deaf people often apply orthographic strategy directly.As a conclusion, the reading abilities of spoken language in deaf non-signers are lower than hearing people. This convinces that the age of sign language acquisition has an positive effect on language learning of deaf and the importance of sign language acquisition should be taken more attention.