The Word Segmentation Of Chinese Deaf Readers:Evidences From Eye Movement

Deaf students generally have difficulties and low reading levels in reading.Recognizing words is an important part of reading comprehension and deaf students may learn and process words in different ways.Therefore,exploring the characteristics of word processing in deaf students has important theoretical value and educational practice significance.Alphabetic text(mainly English)national scholars explored it earlier,but considering the difference between Chinese and alphabetic text in terms of visual form and vocabulary recognition,the value of these research conclusions in guiding the practice of Chinese deaf readers' education is limited,so it is very necessary to explore the characteristics of the Chinese deaf readers' vocabulary processing based on the particularity of Chinese writing.Compared with the alphabetic type of text,the word segmentation is a unique vocabulary processing link in Chinese reading.Through three sub-studies,this study systematically investigated the process of word segmentation in Chinese deaf reading.In the first study,the word-segmentation task was used to analyze the differences in the performance between the deaf students and the hearing students who matched the reading level(RM)and the hearing students with matched age(AM),in order to initially explore the characteristics of the word segmentation in the reading of the deaf students.The results showed that the correct rate of the word-segmentation task of the deaf group and its RM group and AM group were about 89.8%,94.7% and 91.3%,respectively.The score of the deaf group was significantly lower than that of the RM group,indicating that there was a difference between the deaf and RM students in segmenting words.There was no significant difference in the scores between the deaf and AM group,but it cannot be ruled out that "the deaf may use different strategies from the AM readers to complete the word segmentation,which leads to the two groups in the equal score."Study 2 and Study 3 used eye-movement technology to continue to explore the characteristics of the word-segmentation process in the reading of deaf students from the cognitive process level.Study 2 explored the characteristics of the overall word-segmentation process of the deaf by statically presenting the word boundary clues.It was found that(1)the space words did not affect the total reading time of the deaf,but the space non-word and the shadow non-word conditions increased it,which indicated that the deaf students need to understand the text information based on segmenting words.(2)Space non-word and shadow non-word conditions hindered the reading of the deaf group respectively lower than that of the RM group and the AM group,indicating that deaf students' dependence on word segmentation in reading and understanding text is different from that of two groups of hearing readers.Study 3 examined the characteristics of the specific word-segmenting stage in the reading of deaf students,and found that(1)The boundary of the prompt word n+1 and the error boundary of the prompt word n+1 had no effect on the reading efficiency and eye movement mode of the deaf group and the RM group,but the prompt word n+1 boundary reduced the total reading time and the gazing time of the AM group.It can be seen that there was no significant difference between the deaf and the RM readers when segmenting words in the preview,but it was different from the AM readers.(2)The error boundary of the prompt word n hindered the reading efficiency of the two groups of hearing readers,but had no effect on the total reading time of the deaf.Combined with the specific eye movement indicators,the wrong boundary of the prompt word n increased the gazing time of the deaf in the vocabulary interest area,but the degree of increase was weaker than the RM group.It can be seen that the cognitive process of the deaf to segment words n is significantly different from the other two groups of hearing readers.Based on the results of the three studies,the following conclusions can be drawn:(1)Deaf students have to segment words in the reading,but their dependence on the word segmentation is weaker than the reading-level-matched and age-matched hearing readers;(2)In the specific processing stage of the word segmentation,the difference between the deaf and the reading-level-matched readers in the previewing to segment word n+1 is not large,and the process by which the deaf readers segments the word n during the fixation is different from the hearing readers.