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The relationship between orthography, phonology and semantics during sentence comprehension: A comparison between deaf and hearing readers
Poster Session E, Friday, October 2, 11:00 am - 1:00 pm, Wangari Maathai
Orna Peleg1, Galya Ben Hur1, Dafna Bergerbest2; 1Tel Aviv University, 2The Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo
Interactive models assume a reading mechanism in which different types of representations and different levels of processing are completely interconnected. Consistent with this assumption, numerous studies have shown that in skilled hearing readers visual words automatically activate their corresponding phonological (sound) and semantic (meaning) representations. Moreover, when the word is presented in a sentence context, the degree of activation of the various representations is influenced by both lexical and contextual factors. The aim of the current study was to examine whether similar interactions occur in skilled deaf readers, and whether these interactions depend on their degree of exposure to the spoken language. To these ends, a context verification task was used, in which deaf and hearing participants had to decide whether a probe word (presented after a sentence) was related to the overall meaning of the preceding sentence. The critical stimuli were two types of Hebrew homographs (words that are spelled the same but have different meanings) - homophonic homographs (same spelling, same sound, e.g., bank-river, bank-money), and heterophonic homographs (same spelling, different sounds, e.g., tear-eye, tear-rip) - embedded in sentence contexts that were biased towards their subordinate (less-frequent) meaning (e.g., ‘The fisherman set on the bank’). In Experiment 1, the probe word was indeed related to the appropriate (subordinate) meaning of the final homograph (e.g., bank - river). To examine contextual (enhancement) effects, the subordinate context condition (e.g., ‘The fisherman set on the bank’ - ‘river’) was compared with a neutral context condition (e.g., ‘They went to the bank’ - ‘river’). In Experiment 2, the probe word was related to the dominant but inappropriate meaning of the final homograph (e.g., bank - money). To examine contextual (suppression) effects, the ambiguous condition (‘The fisherman set on the bank’ - ‘money’) was compared with an unambiguous control condition (‘The fisherman set on the shore’ - ‘money’). A comparison between the hearing group and the entire deaf group showed no substantial difference between the two groups. Nevertheless, when the entire deaf group was divided into two sub-groups: a group of ‘oral’ deaf participants (who underwent cochlear implant surgery at a young age and were integrated into regular educational frameworks), and a group of ‘less oral’ deaf participants (who rely less on hearing aids and were mainly educated in special educational frameworks), clear differences were observed between the ‘less-oral’ deaf group and the other two groups. Specifically, compared to the hearing group and the ‘oral’ deaf group, the ‘less oral’ deaf group showed weaker phonological and semantic effects (i.e., they were less sensitive to the phonological status of the homograph, and to the semantic context in which it occurred). This indicates that the extent of exposure to the spoken language indeed affects the degree of interactions within the reading system, such that ‘oral’ deaf individuals show reading patterns similar to hearing readers, while ‘less oral’ deaf individuals show different reading patterns reflecting weaker connectivity between orthography, phonology, and semantics.
Topic Areas: Reading, Phonology