English as the second language of deaf children.

Administered the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) to 13 deaf adolescents with deaf parents and to 13 deaf adolescents with hearing parents. Scores achieved by all Ss on the Paragraph Meaning and Language subtests of the Stanford Achievement Test were also available. Ss with deaf parents scored significantly higher than Ss with hearing parents on all but 1 measure. Performance by hearing, foreign students on the TOEFL was more highly correlated with the performance by Ss with deaf parents than with the performance by Ss with hearing parents. Results indicate that English may be a 2nd language for deaf children and that early experience with sign language may facilitate later learning of English. (27 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Continual association as a function of level of creativity and type of verbal stimulus.

Continual word association was studied as a function of Remote Associates Test (RAT) performance, form class, associative hierarchy, and Thorndike-Lorge word frequency. Ss were selected as high creative (HC), low creative (LC), and medium creative (MC) on the basis of their RAT scores. It was found that HC Ss give the greatest number of associations and maintain a relatively higher speed of association throughout a 2-min. period. More responses were elicited by nouns than adjectives, flat hierarchy words than steep, and high frequency words than low. The S and stimulus variable did not interact. Relevance to an associative theory of creative thinking is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Comparing the mental lexicons of deaf and hearing individuals.

This study compared the organization of verbal concept knowledge in deaf and hearing adults. Such organization has been shown to influence performance by hearing adults on language and memory tasks, but comparisons of deaf and hearing individuals' mental lexicons have not been conducted. A semantic association task was used to estimate the mental lexicons of deaf and hearing adults for a sample of words that were either sound related or not sound related. Estimates of the size of the associative set for a given word and the strength of the relationship between the word and its associates were computed. The associative sets of deaf and hearing adults varied in the coherence and accessibility of the lexical concepts but showed generally high agreement in the strengths of the relationships within the associative sets. Observed similarities and differences between deaf and hearing adults were comparable for sound-related and not-sound-related words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Peer interaction in young deaf children: The effect of partner hearing status and familiarity.

14 deaf 54–83 mo olds were videotaped playing once with each of 4 partners: a familiar deaf playmate, a familiar hearing playmate, an unfamiliar hearing child who was a playmate of another deaf child, and an unfamiliar hearing child who had little experience playing with deaf children. 21 hearing and 7 deaf playmates participated. Deaf Ss rarely used language, and formal language use was not related to measures of interaction or play even when playing with another deaf child. Instead, interaction and pretense seemed to be related to the deaf Ss' nonlinguistic communication abilities. Partner hearing status primarily affected communication, with communication between deaf playmates being more visual (both linguistic and nonlinguistic) and less object-based than communication between deaf and hearing playmates. Familiarity played a larger role than experience in improving interaction between deaf and hearing children. The hearing children were more responsive to and used more visual communication devices with their deaf playmate than an unfamiliar deaf child. But the hearing playmates were no better at playing with an unfamiliar deaf child than were hearing children who had little experience playing with deaf children. Implications for the understanding of young children's communication abilities and for deaf educational programs are discussed. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cerebral laterality in deaf and hearing children.

Studied the development of lateralization of cerebral function in 20 hearing and 20 prelingually deaf children using the concurrent task paradigm. Ss were aged 5–6 and 11–12 yrs; all were right-handed. Concurrent processing of a nonverbal task did not cause a selective hand impairment monitored by a manual tapping task. However, deaf Ss were more impaired than hearing Ss in both age groups. Using a concurrent verbal task, both groups manifested a selective impairment of right-hand performance. The deaf also showed a greater left-hand decrement than did the hearing Ss. This result suggests that hemispheric specialization may be less apparent in the deaf than in hearing children. The factor of cognitive task difficulty is suggested as an explanation of these results. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

An illusion of memory: False recognition influenced by unconscious perception.

The results of two experiments showed that an illusion of memory can be produced by unconscious perception. In a first phase of those experiments, a long list of words was presented for study. For the test of recognition memory given in the second phase of each experiment, presentation of a "context" word preceded that of most recognition test words. Ss were to judge whether or not the test words had been presented during the earlier study phase of the experiment. Effects of a context word on this recognition memory decision were opposite when Ss were aware vs. unaware of its presentation. For example, as compared to a condition in which no context word was presented, the probability of false recognition was increased when Ss were unaware but decreased when Ss were aware of the presentation of a context word that matched the recognition test word. Results are discussed in terms of unconscious influences on an attribution process. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Hypnotic deafness: Now you hear it—now you still hear it.

24 undergraduates who had been preselected as either high or low on hypnotic susceptibility (according to the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility) listened to 2 dichotically presented word pair lists. One list was presented following a suggestion for unilateral deafness and the other following instructions for selective attention. All Ss received both treatments in counterbalanced order, and an index of auditory intrusions from the unattended (or "deaf") ear was obtained following each trial. High susceptibles showed no more evidence of unilateral hearing impairment than low susceptibles under either the deafness suggestion or selective attention treatment. Nevertheless, high susceptibles reported greater deafness than low susceptibles on a posttest scale. (13 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Hearing status and language fluency as predictors of automatic word and sign recognition

In previous studies, evidence concerning the extent of automatic word recognition in deaf children and the influence of language fluency on word and sign recognition (as indexed by the Stroop task) has been contradictory. This study examined the effects of English and sign language fluency in the automatic word and sign recognition of deaf and hearing adults. Results indicated that responding in sign took longer and created more Stroop interference than responding orally. Two groups of certified interpreters revealed this finding to be independent of hearing status. Most important, deaf subjects showed greater automaticity in recognizing signs than words, whereas hearing subjects showed greater automaticity in recognizing words than signs. This pattern was unaffected by language fluency. The findings clarify the results of previous studies both theoretically and methodologically.     

Color-object paired associates in deaf and hearing children with and without response competition.

Deaf and hearing Ss, aged 6 and 10, were compared in 2 nonverbally presented paired-associates tasks. One condition used neutral color stimuli unrelated to toy response objects and another condition had colors systematically related to the same objects to provide interfering response competition. Age differences were observed, while task interacted with deafness such that hearing but not deaf Ss were impeded by the interference condition relative to the neutral condition. It was concluded that deaf Ss showed no perceptual rigidity and that covert verbalizations of hearing Ss or experiential poverty in deaf Ss produced the differential task effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Verbal discrimination of pleasant and unpleasant stimuli prior to specific identification.

"The present study investigated the capacity of human Ss to judge the emotional quality of stimuli presented too briefly [tachistoscopically] and at illumination levels too low for correct specific identification… . After the exposure of each word, the Ss were required to judge whether the word was pleasant or unpleasant as well as to guess what the word was… . the results revealed that in the absence of specific recognition or identification of the stimuli, the Ss' affective judgments were more often correct than could be attributed to chance." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Visual short-term memory in the hearing and the deaf.

Tested 9 deaf and 9 normal 15-27 yr olds on their ability to report letters, shapes, and nonsense figures from a tachistoscopic presentation. Deaf Ss performed worse than hearing Ss on recall of figural information, thereby supporting a linguistic coding hypothesis. However, there was no difference between the groups on position information, and letter confusions were primarily visual in both groups. Findings suggest that more attention should be given to visual short-term memory in theoretical models of memory. Formation of the icon was apparently not affected by a linguistic deficit, since effects of stimulus duration and type of viewing (continuous vs interrupted) were similar in both hearing and deaf Ss. Significant positive correlations which were found between deaf Ss' school reading scores and their tachistoscopic scores were not interpreted as support for a linguistic coding hypothesis, but rather as support for the notion that the memory skills tested in the experiment may underlie reading ability. (French summary) (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Personal adjustment and the free recall of materials with affectively positive or negative meaningfulness.

Conducted 2 experiments on the role of affective assessment in human verbal learning. In Exp I, 40 high school students grouped according to Tennessee Self-Concept Scale scores were given consonant-vowel-consonant trigrams as learnable items. Ss with high self-concepts learned the trigrams they liked more rapidly than disliked trigrams. Ss with low self-concepts reversed this customary pattern and learned disliked trigrams more rapidly than liked trigrams. In Exp II, 64 undergraduates who had completed the Barron Ego-Strength scale were given real words as learnable materials. Results showed that it was possible for the same S to learn certain words along a negative and other words along a positive reinforcement-value sequence. This depended upon whether the word meanings involved reflected a problem area or an area of competence for the Ss being studied. (34 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Finger electromyographic activity during sleep: Its relation to dreaming in deaf and normal subjects.

Observations carried out during the sleep of 13 deaf Ss showed that: (a) the rates of dream recall from rapid eye movement (REM) periods were similar to those for normal hearing Ss; (b) finger electromyographic (EMG) bursts outside of REM periods were not related to the recall of mental activity; (c) in both deaf and hearing Ss, REM periods showed a consistently accelerated rate of finger EMG activity in comparison with other stages of sleep; (d) contrary to expectations, rates of finger EMG activity for 10 normal hearing Ss were just as high as those of the deaf group. The implications of this finding for the motor theory of thinking were discussed. (18 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of attention, as indexed by subsequent memory, on electrodermal detection of information.

Three closely related experiments tested the effects of attention, as indexed by subsequent memory, on electrodermal detection of information. A total of 62 male college students attempted to conceal 6 critical items of information from a polygraph examiner recording their electrodermal response (EDR). In the polygraph test the S was asked if any of a list of 24 words, 1 every 10–25 sec, were critical items he was concealing. The list was comprised of 3 semantically similar control words along with each critical word. Afterward, without forewarning, a 2nd experimenter asked the S to remember all the words he had been asked about on the test. Deceptive Ss who gave a larger EDR to critical than to control words more often than could be expected by chance (i.e., were correctly detected as deceptive) remembered more control words than did other deceptive Ss who escaped detection. Results are interpreted to mean that the less thoroughly an S processes the test words, as indexed by later memory, the less likely he is to be detected. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On detecting words embedded in a stream of auditory letters.

Presented 40 undergraduates with a stream of auditory letters in which some of the letters formed words. Ss were or were not given cues for the start of the words. It was found that (a) Ss required an indication of which letters started words. If certain letters formed part of more than 1 word, S detected the word for which a cue was provided but more often than not failed to detect the other word. When cues were provided on both words, the probability of getting both depended on the extent to which the 2 words "overlapped" in common letters. Results are discussed in the light of current work on serial processing. (French summary) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conceptual performance in deaf adults.

Noncollege deaf adults were compared with hearing controls on a series of 8 nonverbal learning and transfer or shift tasks which were designed to test an S's ability to combine previously discovered elements into new disjunctive and conjunctive groupings. In terms of total errors, successes, and trials to criterion, performance on these tasks was found to differentiate high from low IQ normal Ss and deaf Ss performed similar to hearing Ss on all tasks except one. These results would seem to refute the hypothesis that deaf people are generally inferior to hearing people in conceptual ability or that deaf children's experimental deficiency would leave a permanent lack in their conceptual development. The need for clarifying the role of language in cognition was stressed. (17 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Anxiety and the variability of word associates.

15 Ss who scored high on the Taylor MA scale and 15 Ss who scored low on the MA scale were given a word associate task. The highly anxious Ss tended to have sets of word associates lower in intersubject variability than the nonanxious Ss for stimulus words that elicited sets of word associates that are low in variability. Highly anxious Ss tended to give sets of word associates higher in intersubject variability than nonanxious Ss for stimulus words that elicited sets of word associates that are high in intersubject variability. A 2nd experiment reports data indicating a relationship between inter- and intrasubject variability of word associates. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive processing by prelingual deaf students as a function of language context.

Investigated the influence of language mode (print or sign) and syntax (English or American Sign Language [ASL]) on recall, preference, and comprehension. In Exp I, the effects of reading meaningful print passages in ASL or English were tested for 12 16–29 yr old deaf and 12 16–28 yr old hearing Ss. An effort toward comprehension interpretation was supported for the hearing Ss only. Deaf Ss not trained in ASL exhibited a familiarity with ASL syntax not exhibited by the hearing Ss. In Exp II, meaningful passages were presented to 30 15–19 yr old prelingual deaf Ss in 4 language contexts (signed English, signed ASL, print English, and print ASL) in a free recall task. Results show greater recall from ASL than from English contexts. Findings indicate that the visual orientation of prelingual deaf individuals, regardless of training in ASL, leads to the development of a sign-based encoding system that responds to ASL as a familiar language. (30 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)