Deaf And Hard-of-Hearing College Students' Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness plays an extremely important role in the processing of written language,and it has long been a highly controversial issue in psycholinguistic research as to whether deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals have phonological awareness.Previous studies,using different experimental paradigms,have yielded varied conclusions.The present study aims to cast new light on this issue.Two behavioral experiments were carried out to investigate the phonological awareness of DHH college students with the help of the tongue-twister effect,and hearing college students were recruited to form a comparison with the DHH participants.Both experiments employed the moving window self-paced reading tasks.In Experiment 1,the critical materials were Chinese sentences containing characters with repeated initials and corresponding control sentences,and Experiment 2 adopted sentences containing characters with repeated finals and corresponding control sentences.In both experiments,the independent variables are phonological property and hearing status,and the dependent variable is reading time.The study yielded the following results.Firstly,the DHH participants' reading times in both experiments were significantly longer than those of the hearing ones,indicating that the former's reading proficiency is significantly lower.Secondly,it took DHH participants significantly longer time to read sentences with phoneme repetition than to read sentences without,and they seemed even more sensitive to this phonological interference than their hearing counterparts.This shows that DHH college students are able to make use of phonological coding during sentence reading,and they also have phonological awareness.The present study also has some limitations.It only took DHH college students as the participants,and they cannot represent the deaf population as a whole.In the future,more studies are needed to investigate the phonological awareness of other groups of deaf people,such as deaf students in senior high schools,junior high schools and even those in elementary schools,so as to use the tongue-twister effect to give a scientific account of DHH individuals' phonological awareness from a developmental point of view.