Research at
Gallaudet University
2005 - 2006

A Psycholinguistic Investigation of Deaf Readers' Activation of Orthography-Phonology Correspondences in Two Languages

Status: Ongoing Begin date: April, 2005 End date: No set date

Description

This study aims to explore whether exposure to a written foreign language might enhance American deaf students' abilities to exploit their knowledge of phonological-orthographical correspondences in English, the written language in which they are more dominant. Studies involving hearing bilinguals with different proficiency levels in their second language have demonstrated that they simultaneously activate spelling-sound knowledge from both of their languages while reading in one language (Dijkstra, et al. 1998; De Groot, et al. 2000; Jared and Kroll, 2001). The researchers plan to test whether deaf university students with advanced and intermediate proficiency levels of written Spanish display a similar activation pattern of orthography/phonology correspondences in their most dominant written language during a task involving lexical decisions in their weaker language.

Investigators