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Why do deaf participants have a lower performance than hearing participants in a visual rhyming task: a phonological hypothesis

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Abstract

During a visual rhyming task, deaf participants traditionally perform more poorly than hearing participants in making rhyme judgements for written words in which the rhyme and the spelling pattern are incongruent (e.g. hair/bear). It has been suggested that deaf participants’ low accuracy results from their tendency to rely on orthographic similarity. To test this interpretation more directly, we compared profoundly and prelingually deaf, orally educated participants and hearing participants’ accuracy during a visual rhyming judgement task in which the two words of a pair share the orthographic rime, in order to discourage usage of a purely orthographic strategy. Accuracy was lower in deaf than in hearing participants. The gradient of difficulty between items, together with the finding of a significant correlation between accuracy and the consistency of the grapheme to rhyme, suggest that difference in accuracy between groups might be explained by an over regularization in deaf people, which is probably linked to less diversified phonological representations.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to all participants and particularly to deaf participants in this process. We wish also to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the previous version of the manuscript. We also thank Carol LaSasso for her assistance with our English writing. We thank Alain Content for his assistance with the statistical procedure.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Cognition Language and Development, University Libre of Brussels, Av. FD Roosevelt 50, CP 191, 1050, Brussels, Belgium

    Mario Aparicio, J. Leybaert & Jesús Alegria

  2. Imaging Laboratory and Cognitive Neuroscience, Unit 7191, National Center for Scientific Research, Strasbourg, France

    Elisabeth Demont

  3. Department of Educational Sciences, University Louis Pasteur of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France

    Marie-Noëlle Metz-Lutz

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  1. Mario Aparicio
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  2. Elisabeth Demont
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  3. Marie-Noëlle Metz-Lutz
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  4. J. Leybaert
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  5. Jesús Alegria
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Correspondence to Mario Aparicio.

Appendix

Appendix

List of word-pairs of the rhyming judgment task

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Aparicio, M., Demont, E., Metz-Lutz, MN. et al. Why do deaf participants have a lower performance than hearing participants in a visual rhyming task: a phonological hypothesis. Read Writ 27, 31–54 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-013-9432-9

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