Study On Deaf Students' Short-term Memory Of English Words

Vocabulary is the most basic material of language.The bulk of learning a new language consists of learning new words.But,for most deaf students,the biggest problem they encounter when learning English is vocabulary learning.Vocabulary acquisition is closely related to the individual's ability to process various related information of English words.However,research on how deaf people process English words is still insufficient.Totally 20 deaf higher vocational and technical college students and 20 hearing higher vocational and technical college students participated in the experiments.From the perspective of short-term memory,this study analyzes their differences in recognition accuracy rate and response time towards different word groups through the method of learning and recognition of English words,in order to explore the causes behind deaf students' lagging behind in vocabulary tasks.The results show that:(1)For word group with similar pronunciation and morphology but different meaning,the recognition correct rate of the deaf subjects and the hearing subjects was significantly different.The hearing subjects performed better than the deaf subjects.There was also a significant difference in the reaction time between the deaf subjects and the hearing subjects.The hearing subjects responded quicker than the deaf subjects.(2)For words with similar meaning,but different pronunciation and morphology,and words with different pronunciation,morphology and meaning,the recognition accuracy rates and reaction time of the deaf subjects and the hearing subjects were not significantly different.The hearing subjects performed a little better than the deaf subjects and the reaction time of the hearing subjects was shorter than that of the deaf subjects.(3)The deaf subjects and the hearing subjects showed similarities in multiple comparisons in three word groups.This indicated that they might be similar in terms of the mental representation of phonic and semantic information between the deaf subjects and the hearing subjects.But the deaf subjects were weaker than the hearing subjects in phonological awareness and semantic organization.This study helps teachers improve the teaching methods of English vocabulary for deaf people.In the course of teaching,teachers should emphasize the acquisition of pronunciation rules,so as to raise deaf students' phonological awareness and thus improve the effect of vocabulary learning.