Phonological Processing During Chinese Reading In Deaf Students

The reading level of most deaf readers lags behind that of the peer hearing readers.Since the main difference between the deaf and the hearing readers is that they have not access to the auditory input,one well accepted explanation for deaf readers’ difficulty is the lack of phonological representation during reading.However,there has been a significant degree of debate within the published literature concerning the extent to which deaf readers activate phonological processing during reading.Some studies have found that deaf readers activate phonological processing during reading in the same way that hearing readers do,while other studies have not found that deaf readers activate phonological processing.The lack of consistency across previous findings could be partially accounted for by factors that include differences in task demands,the transparency of the language system,and individual abilities of deaf.Therefore,this study sought to make the controversy regarding the phonological processing of deaf readers clear with these three factors,and employed three experiments to investigate the phonological processing of deaf students in Chinese reading.In the experiment 1,using mask prime paradigm to examine the phonological processing of deaf middle school students in a single Chinese character recognition.The experiment design was 3(groups:deaf middle school students,chronological age-matched hearing(CA)group,reading ability-matched hearing(RA)group)×2(SOA:80ms,100ms)×2(prime type:homophone,unrelated character)mixed design,78 students participated in the experiment,26 in each group.The results showed that:(1)The deaf middle school students and the CA group showed significant phonological priming effects in the 80ms and 100ms SOA.When the homophone was primed,the response to the target word was significantly shorter than the unrelated character was primed.The RA group did not show significant phonological priming effects;(2)the phono]ogica]priming effect of the deaf middle school students was not affected by reading ability.In the experiment 2,the error disruption paradigm was used to investigate the phonological processing of the deaf middle school students during Chinese sentence reading.The experiment design was 3(group:hearing impaired middle school student group,CA group,RA group)× 3(character type:correct character,homophone,unrelated character)mixed design.The results showed that:(1)The regression path time and total reading time on homophone were significantly shorter than the time on the unrelated character in the two hearing control groups,and the deaf middle school students showed the similar homophone advantage effect in the total reading time;(2)The homophone advantage of deaf students was affected by reading ability.The significant homophone advantage is observed in the skilled deaf students,and the less-skilled deaf students did not show the homophone advantage.On the basis of experiment 2,the experiment 3 examined the phonological processing of deaf college students during Chinese sentence reading.The eye movement data of 72 students were collected,24 in each group.The results showed that:(1)The regression path time and total reading time on homophone were significantly shorter than the time on the unrelated character in the two groups of the hearing control group,and the deaf college students showed the similar homophone advantage effect in the total reading time;(2)the homophone advantage of the deaf college students was not affected by the reading ability,but was influenced by the oral ability,and the oral sroup showed the homophone advantage in the total reading time,but the less-oral group did not show the homophone advantage in all the eye movement data.Through the three experiments,the results showed that the deaf students can activate phonological processing in Chinese reading,and the phonological processing in the sentence reading was affected by the reading ability and the oral ability.The skilled deaf middle school students activated phonological processing during sentence reading,while the less-skilled deaf middle school students did not activate phonological processing during sentence reading;the oral deaf college students activated phonological processing during sentence reading,and the less-oral deaf college students did not activate phonological processing during sentence reading.