The rhyming skills of deaf children educated with phonetically augmented speechreading

Two experiments investigated whether profoundly deaf children's rhyming ability was determined by the linguistic input that they were exposed to in their early childhood. Children educated with Cued Speech (CS) were compared to other deaf children, educated orally or with sign language. In CS, speechreading is combined with manual cues that disambiguate it. The central hypothesis is that CS allows deaf children to develop accurate phonological representations, which, in turn, assist in the emergence of accurate rhyming abilities. Experiment 1 showed that the deaf children educated early with CS performed better at rhyme judgement than did other deaf children. The performance of early CS-users was not influenced by word spelling. Experiment 2 confirmed this result in a rhyme generation task. Taken together, results support the hypothesis that rhyming ability depends on early exposure to a linguistic input specifying all phonological contrasts, independently of the modality (visual or auditory) in which this input is perceived.     

Phonological representations in deaf children: the importance of early linguistic experience

It is argued that the development of phonological representations in deaf children does not necessarily depend on auditory speech experience, neither at the perception nor at the production level. Instead, this development depends upon early experience of an input in which all phonological contrasts are well specified, independently of input modality. This is argued on the basis of the studies investigating phonological and morpho-phonological abilities of profoundly deaf children early exposed to Cued Speech. The paper is concluded with some speculations about the effect of early exposure to CS on the development of language specific processes housed in the left-hemisphere.     

Deafness, spelling and rhyme: How spelling supports written word and picture rhyming skills in deaf subjects

Orally trained, congenitally deaf adolescents and hearing, reading-age-matched control subjects made rhyme judgements for pictures and for written words. Hearing children performed the task accurately. By contrast, the deaf group were very poor at rhyme judgement for words and for pictures. For hearing children, word rhyme judgement was more accurate when the words were congruent in their spelling pattern (e.g. bat/hat), less accurate when the spelling pattern of the rhyming words was incongruent (hair/bear). Deaf subjects showed an even more pronounced effect of spelling congruence; their ability to match for rhyme when written words did not share the same spelling pattern was extremely poor. Moreover, spelling congruence predicted deaf subjects' picture rhyming skills.

We conclude that oral training for deaf people does not always permit them to achieve a reliable phonological representation of speech from lip-reading and residual hearing alone. Instead they use the written spelling of the word. This result is not predicted from some previous results that suggest that orally trained deaf people can make direct, spontaneous use of rhyme in the processing of visually presented material.     

Deaf and hearing children's plural noun spelling

The present study examines deaf and hearing children's spelling of plural nouns. Severe literacy impairments are well documented in the deaf, which are believed to be a consequence of phonological awareness limitations. Fifty deaf (mean chronological age 13;10 years, mean reading age 7;5 years) and 50 reading-age-matched hearing children produced spellings of regular, semiregular, and irregular plural nouns in Experiment 1 and nonword plurals in Experiment 2. Deaf children performed reading-age appropriately on rule-based (regular and semiregular) plurals but were significantly less accurate at spelling irregular plurals. Spelling of plural nonwords and spelling error analyses revealed clear evidence for use of morphology. Deaf children used morphological generalization to a greater degree than their reading-age-matched hearing counterparts. Also, hearing children combined use of phonology and morphology to guide spelling, whereas deaf children appeared to use morphology without phonological mediation. Therefore, use of morphology in spelling can be independent of phonology and is available to the deaf despite limited experience with spoken language. Indeed, deaf children appear to be learning about morphology from the orthography. Education on more complex morphological generalization and exceptions may be highly beneficial not only for the deaf but also for other populations with phonological awareness limitations.     

Early experience of Cued Speech enhances speechreading performance in deaf

It is known that deaf individuals usually outperform normal hearing subjects in speechreading; however, the underlying reasons remain unclear. In the present study, speechreading performance was assessed in normal hearing participants (NH), deaf participants who had been exposed to the Cued Speech (CS) system early and intensively, and deaf participants exposed to oral language without Cued Speech (NCS). Results show a gradation in performance with highest performance in CS, then in NCS, and finally NH participants. Moreover, error analysis suggests that speechreading processing is more accurate in the CS group than in the other groups. Given that early and intensive CS has been shown to promote development of accurate phonological processing, we propose that the higher speechreading results in Cued Speech users are linked to a better capacity in phonological decoding of visual articulators.     

Lateralization effects during semantic and rhyme judgement tasks in deaf and hearing subjects

A visual hemifield experiment investigated hemispheric specialization among hearing children and adults and prelingually, profoundly deaf youngsters who were exposed intensively to Cued Speech (CS). Of interest was whether deaf CS users, who undergo a development of phonology and grammar of the spoken language similar to that of hearing youngsters, would display similar laterality patterns in the processing of written language. Semantic, rhyme, and visual judgement tasks were used. In the visual task no VF advantage was observed. A RVF (left hemisphere) advantage was obtained for both the deaf and the hearing subjects for the semantic task, supporting Neville's claim that the acquisition of competence in the grammar of language is critical in establishing the specialization of the left hemisphere for language. For the rhyme task, however, a RVF advantage was obtained for the hearing subjects, but not for the deaf ones, suggesting that different neural resources are recruited by deaf and hearing subjects. Hearing the sounds of language may be necessary to develop left lateralised processing of rhymes.     

Phonological coding in word reading: Evidence from hearing and deaf readers

The ability of prelingually, profoundly deaf readers to access phonological information during reading was investigated in three experiments. The experiments employed a task, developed by Meyer, Schvaneveldt, and Ruddy (1974), in which lexical decision response times (RTs) to orthographically similar rhyming (e.g., WAVE-SAVE) and nortrhyming (e.g., HAVE-CAVE) word pairs were compared with RTs to orthographically and phonologically dissimilar control word pairs. The subjects of the study were deaf college students and hearing college students. In Experiments 1 and 2, in which the nonwords were pronounceable, the deaf subjects, like the hearing subjects, were facilitated in their RTs to rhyming pairs, but not to nonrhyming pairs. In Experiment 3, in which the nonwords were unpronounceable, both deaf and hearing subjects were facilitated in their RTs to both rhyming and nonrhyming pairs, with the facilitation being significantly greater for the rhyming pairs. These results indicate that access to phonological information is possible despite prelingual and profound hearing impairment. As such, they run counter to claims that deaf individuals are limited to the use of visual strategies in reading. Given the impoverished auditory, experience of such readers, these results suggest that the use of phonological information need not be tied to the auditory modality.     

Determinants of spelling ability in deaf and hearing adults: Access to linguistic structure

The extent to which ability to access linguistic regularities of the orthography is dependent on spoken language was investigated in a two-part spelling test administered to both hearing and profoundly deaf college students. The spelling test examined ability to spell words varying in the degree to which their correct orthographic representation could be derived from the linguistic structure of English. Both groups of subjects were found to be sensitive to the underlying regularities of the orthography as indicated by greater accuracy on linguistically-derivable words than on irregular words. Comparison of accuracy on a production task and on a multiple-choice recognition task showed that the performance of both deaf and hearing subjects benefited from the recognition format, but especially so in the spelling of irregular words. Differences in the underlying spelling process for deaf and hearing spellers were revealed in an analysis of their misspellings: Deaf subjects produced fewer phonetically accurate misspellings than did the hearing subjects. Nonetheless, the deaf spellers tended to observe the formational constraints of English phonology and morphology in their misspellings. Together, these results suggest that deaf subjects are able to develop an appreciation for the structural properties of the orthography, but that their spelling may be guided by an accurate representation of the phonetic structure of words to a lesser degree than it is for hearing spellers.     

Acquisition and use of spelling-sound correspondences in reading

The acquisition and use of knowledge concerning the spelling-sound correspondences of English were evaluated by having children read words and nonwords that contained regular and homographic spelling patterns. Regular spelling patterns are associated with a single pronunciation (e.g., -UST as in MUST); homographic patterns have multiple pronunciations (e.g., -OSE as in HOSE, DOSE, LOSE). Analyses of errors, latencies, and pronunciations provided evidence for two complementary developmental processes: good beginning readers rapidly learn to recognize high-frequency words from visual input alone, while at the same time they are expanding and consolidating their knowledge of spelling-sound correspondences. Younger and poor readers rely more on phonological information in word decoding, as evidenced by their particular difficulty reading homographic spelling patterns. Poor readers do not appear to use a radically different strategy for reading words: their perfomance is similar to that of younger, good readers.     

Developmental dysgraphias

Two cases of developmental dysgraphia are presented. These ten-year-old children are of at least average intelligence and vocabulary, with normal speech and no known neurological abnormality. Psycholinguistic investigations reveal that although performance for the two cases is quantitatively similar, there are marked qualitative differences: The majority of R.B.'s spelling errors are phonologically plausible, and she is better at spelling regular than irregular words. Non-word spelling is as good as word spelling. The pattern of spelling deficit is consistent with the label surface dysgraphia. A phonological route to spelling has developed in relative isolation from a lexical-semantic route to spelling. A.H.'s spelling contrasts in a number of ways with R.B.'s. Fewer than 1/5 of his spelling errors are phonologically plausible, and the spelling of regular words is no better than the spelling of irregular words. A.H. may have impaired development of the segmentation component of the phonological route and therefore be overreliant on an, albeit imperfect, lexical-semantic spelling route. Normal children at the same spelling level display patterns of performance similar to R.B. but differ quantitatively from A.H.     

Developmental surface dyslexia and dysgraphia: An orthographic processing impairment

This study presents a detailed investigation of a young man in his early twenties who has suffered from a severe spelling impairment since childhood, and currently has a spelling age of only 9 years and 2 months. In contrast with the developmental phonological dyslexics reported by Campbell and Butterworth (1985) and Funnell and Davison (1989), his performance on tests of phonological awareness is good. In addition, he can read and spell non-words competently and, unlike normal 9-year-old children, virtually all of his spelling errors are phonologically appropriate. Further analysis of these errors reveals that he has knowledge of many of the different ways in which a given phoneme can be written, and that he uses phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences at the end of a word that are different from those he uses earlier in a word. However, he finds it difficult to spell words that contain uncommon phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences, which is compatible with the view that he has not developed an orthographic spelling lexicon. Although his oral reading of words is prompt and generally accurate, analysis of his lexical decision performance and the way that he defines homophones indicate that he does not have fully specified lexical entries available for reading either. We suggest that he suffers from a general orthographic processing deficit, and relies instead upon the combination of sub-lexical phonology and a lexicon that contains only partial information about way in which words are spelt. This leads to reasonably competent reading, even of many irregular words, but produces very poor spelling. It is argued that qualitatively different types of developmental dyslexia do genuinely exist, but that reading impairments are likely to be much more pronounced in children who have a phonological rather than an orthographic processing deficit.     

Phonological and morphological consistency in the acquisition of vowel duration spelling in Dutch and German

In Dutch, vowel duration spelling is phonologically consistent but morphologically inconsistent (e.g., paar-paren). In German, it is phonologically inconsistent but morphologically consistent (e.g., Paar-Paare). Contrasting the two orthographies allowed us to examine the role of phonological and morphological consistency in the acquisition of the same orthographic feature. Dutch and German children in Grades 2 to 4 spelled singular and plural word forms and in a second task identified the correct spelling of singular and plural forms of the same nonword. Dutch children were better in word spelling, but German children outperformed the Dutch children in nonword selection. Also, whereas German children performed on a similar level for singular and plural items, Dutch children showed a large discrepancy. The results indicate that children use phonological and morphological rules from an early age but that the developmental balance between the two sources of information is constrained by the specific orthography.     

Phonological and morphological consistency in the acquisition of vowel duration spelling in Dutch and German

In Dutch, vowel duration spelling is phonologically consistent but morphologically inconsistent (e.g., paar–paren). In German, it is phonologically inconsistent but morphologically consistent (e.g., Paar–Paare). Contrasting the two orthographies allowed us to examine the role of phonological and morphological consistency in the acquisition of the same orthographic feature. Dutch and German children in Grades 2 to 4 spelled singular and plural word forms and in a second task identified the correct spelling of singular and plural forms of the same nonword. Dutch children were better in word spelling, but German children outperformed the Dutch children in nonword selection. Also, whereas German children performed on a similar level for singular and plural items, Dutch children showed a large discrepancy. The results indicate that children use phonological and morphological rules from an early age but that the developmental balance between the two sources of information is constrained by the specific orthography.     

Lexical access for low- and high-frequency words in Hebrew

The hypothesis that phonological mediation is involved to a greater extent in the recognition of low- than in the recognition of high-frequency words was examined using Hebrew. Hebrew has two forms of spelling, pointed and unpointed, which differ greatly in the extent of phonological ambiguity, with the unpointed spelling lacking almost all vowel information. A lexical decision task was employed using target words that had only one pronunciation whether pointed or unpointed. Targets were either pointed or unpointed and were preceded by a prime, which for word targets, was either semantically related or unrelated. The results indicated the following: First, the advantage of pointed over unpointed spelling was larger for low-frequency than for high-frequency words, suggesting a stronger phonological mediation for low-frequency words. Second, the size of the pointing effect was independent of word length, suggesting that phonology is obtained on the basis of the printed word as a whole, by looking it up in a phonological lexicon. Third, response latency to nonwords was not affected by the presence or absence of pointing, suggesting that failure to locate the entry corresponding to a letter string in a phonological lexicon results in a NO decision. Fourth, presence of a related prime was not found to compensate for absence of pointing, suggesting that the activation of a word’s representation in the semantic lexicon does not aid access to its corresponding entry in the phonological lexicon.     

Modelling relations between sensory processing, speech perception, orthographic and phonological ability, and literacy achievement

The general magnocellular theory postulates that dyslexia is the consequence of a multimodal deficit in the processing of transient and dynamic stimuli. In the auditory modality, this deficit has been hypothesized to interfere with accurate speech perception, and subsequently disrupt the development of phonological and later reading and spelling skills. In the visual modality, an analogous problem might interfere with literacy development by affecting orthographic skills. In this prospective longitudinal study, we tested dynamic auditory and visual processing, speech-in-noise perception, phonological ability and orthographic ability in 62 five-year-old preschool children. Predictive relations towards first grade reading and spelling measures were explored and the validity of the global magnocellular model was evaluated using causal path analysis. In particular, we demonstrated that dynamic auditory processing was related to speech perception, which itself was related to phonological awareness. Similarly, dynamic visual processing was related to orthographic ability. Subsequently, phonological awareness, orthographic ability and verbal short-term memory were unique predictors of reading and spelling development.     

Phonological spelling

A case study is presented of phonological spelling, an acquired spelling disorder in which the primary symptom is the occurrence of phonologically plausible errors (e.g. "flood" → flud). Not all of the patient's spelling errors are as phonologically "perfect" as this example; but it is arguable that the errors primarily derive from a routine which segments a phonological code and assigns orthographic representations to these individual segments. This account of errors in phonological spelling is contrasted with an interpretation of oral reading errors in surface dyslexia. We conclude that errors in the two disorders do not reveal a precise parallel, and that the contrast is partly attributable to the differential role of comprehension in reading and spelling.     

Phonological sensitivity and the acquisition of new words in children

Two studies are reported which aimed to examine the relationship between phonological sensitivity and the acquisition of new words that systematically differed in the familiarity of their sound structures. In the first study measures of phonological sensitivity, phonological short-term memory, vocabulary, and nonverbal ability were administered to forty-one 5-year-old children. Phonological sensitivity was related to the paired-associate learning of phonologically unfamiliar words, but not to the learning of familiar words. In the second study a group of 14 nonreading 5-year-old children received phonological sensitivity training. A control group was trained in semantic categorization. After the training, the phonological sensitivity group did perform better on measures of letter knowledge and phonological sensitivity (rhyme and first-sound categorization) and appeared to learn phonologically unfamiliar words more easily. The findings of both studies suggest that phonological sensitivity can support the acquisition of novel words.     

Skilled adult readers activate the meanings of high-frequency words using phonology: Evidence from eye tracking

We examined whether highly skilled adult readers activate the meanings of high-frequency words using phonology when reading sentences for meaning. A homophone-error paradigm was used. Sentences were written to fit 1 member of a homophone pair, and then 2 other versions were created in which the homophone was replaced by its mate or a spelling-control word. The error words were all high-frequency words, and the correct homophones were either higher-frequency words or low-frequency words—that is, the homophone errors were either the subordinate or dominant member of the pair. Participants read sentences as their eye movements were tracked. When the high-frequency homophone error words were the subordinate member of the homophone pair, participants had shorter immediate eye-fixation latencies on these words than on matched spelling-control words. In contrast, when the high-frequency homophone error words were the dominant member of the homophone pair, a difference between these words and spelling controls was delayed. These findings provide clear evidence that the meanings of high-frequency words are activated by phonological representations when skilled readers read sentences for meaning. Explanations of the differing patterns of results depending on homophone dominance are discussed.     

Word regularity affects orthographic learning

Share's self-teaching hypothesis proposes that orthographic representations are acquired via phonological decoding. A key, yet untested, prediction of this theory is that there should be an effect of word regularity on the number and quality of word-specific orthographic representations that children acquire. Thirty-four Grade 2 children were exposed to the sound and meaning of eight novel words and were then presented with those words in written form in short stories. Half the words were assigned regular pronunciations and half irregular pronunciations. Lexical decision and spelling tasks conducted 10 days later revealed that the children's orthographic representations of the regular words appeared to be stronger and more extensive than those of the irregular words.     

不同感觉通道词汇影响聋生汉字加工的实验研究

本研究为考察聋生在接受不同感觉通道词汇时的汉字加工特点和听觉编码所起的作用,采用听觉词汇、视觉词汇和其他感觉词汇等三类词汇为实验材料,对手语聋生组、口语聋生组以及大学生进行了新旧词汇判断、包含与排除两个实验。实验表明,聋生在汉字加工中不仅使用视觉编码,而且无意识地、自动地使用了听觉编码,这在内隐测验中可表现出来。由此可推断,聋生汉字加工困难的原因在于有意识地使用听觉编码的能力较低。