The objective of this study was to clarify the nature and efficiency of the word recognition skills of prelingually deafened Hebrew readers and the way these skills relate to their reading comprehension level. Relevant data were gathered by means of a research paradigm demanding the same/different categorization of phonologically or formationally manipulated word pairs and by a sentence comprehension test (SCT). Participants were prelingually deafened individuals (n=22, mean grade=8.7) who attested to using sign language as their preferred means for communication, and a task-matched hearing control group (n=40, mean grade=8.9). In general, findings suggest that both hearing readers and readers with prelingual deafness rely upon orthographic knowledge rather than upon their primary language for mediating the processing of written words in the working memory (WM). As predicted, in comparison to their hearing counterparts, the reading comprehension of the prelingually deafened participants, as a group, was significantly impaired. Comparative analyses of quantitative and qualitative aspects of the same/different categorizations of word pairs by the participant groups, and the way these correlated with performance on the SCT clearly indicated, however, that this weakness is not rooted in poor word recognition skills but probably reflects a lack of syntactic knowledge crucial for the adequate, post-lexical processing of recognized words. Finally, the findings convincingly show that, despite their profound hearing loss, some individuals who were prelingually deaf acquired rule-based knowledge for the adequate processing of written text.
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Notes
Israeli sign language (ISL) is a full-fledged language used by the deaf community in Israel. As in ASL, its vocabulary is built systematically according to limited sets of formational parameters such as hand shape, hand movement, place of articulation, etc.
The term ‘‘conventional identicalness’’ refers to an identity between two words that cannot be determined on a mere perceptual basis, but that must be mediated by some form of knowledge.
The sentence comprehension test used for attaining the reading comprehension of the participants was an abbreviated, adjusted version of Miller’s syntactic ability test (SAT) (Miller, 2000).
The similarity between Signed Hebrew and spoken Hebrew is limited to a rough matching of the sign order to the word order in Hebrew. There are, however, many incompatibilities between the two systems, such as an almost complete lack of devices in Signed Hebrew to represent the rather rich morphological structure of spoken Hebrew.
Most alphabetic writing systems merge discrete letter-graphemes representing the consonants and vowels of words into visually distinct, serially ordered letter sequences. Unlike such writing systems, in Hebrew, a significant part of the vowel information is not represented by letter-graphemes inserted between consonantal letters, but by means of small diacritical marks (dashes and points), normally placed below, and clearly separated from, the consonantal letter string. However, diacritics in Hebrew orthography are optional and the average Hebrew reader is capable of reading a text even if they are not indicated. This form of Hebrew orthography is called unpointed Hebrew. Israeli reading materials above the early grade levels are printed almost exclusively in unpointed Hebrew. In this study, the Hebrew words used for assessing the word processing strategy of the participants and the words used for preparing the SAT were all unpointed.
Hebrew is read from the right to the left.
The relevant, basic, formational (linguistic) categories underlying the composition of a sign are hand shape, movement, and place of sign articulation relative to the body of the signer. Word pairs with formationally similar paralleling signs were built from two words that had paralleling signs that differed only on one of these formational parameters (e.g., same hand shape, same movement, different place of articulation; or, different hand shape, same movement, same place of articulation, etc.). In the control condition, the words paralleling signs differed on all of their formational parameters, except in two instances where the signs used the same place of articulation.
The doubling of the stimuli pairs was necessary because rhyming words in which phonological congruity is not reflected at the graphemic level are very rare. The fact that such words had to be familiar to the participants with deafness restricted this already small word pool even further.
All the words used for the preparation of the test sentences were taken from a word pool congregated by the author for the preparation of sentences in a previous experiment (Miller, 2000). All the words in this pool were rated by two teachers of the deaf and a speech therapist—all of them working closely with deaf children at the initial primary school levels—to be within the realm of the vocabulary of deaf second graders. Only words with existing paralleling sign were included in the word pool.
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Miller, P. What the Visual Word Recognition Skills of Prelingually Deafened Readers Tell About Their Reading Comprehension Problems. J Dev Phys Disabil 18, 91–121 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10882-006-9002-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10882-006-9002-z