Research at
Gallaudet University
2005 - 2006

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

Status: Ongoing Begin date: May, 2006 End date: May, 2007

Description

Current bilingual research (e.g. Jared and Kroll, 2001) has shown that hearing bilinguals reading in one language simultaneously activate phonology-orthography correspondences that exist in the other language. By testing deaf university students with advanced and intermediate proficiency levels of written Spanish, this study plans to examine whether a similar crosslinguistic activation pattern of orthography/phonology correspondences can be observed in lexical decision tasks involving the subjects' stronger and weaker written languages. This research, thus, fits within and expands on current lines of inquiry in psycholinguistic research on bilingualism. The subjects are a group of college-level, hearing and deaf second language learners of Spanish.
 
Results from the hearing subjects show a clear phonological coding effect (indicated by longer reaction times to words with phonological competitors). No phonological awareness enhancement in English is found among hearing subjects after being exposed to the "treatment" block of Spanish words. Data from the deaf subjects is still being collected. No analysis has yet been performed.

Investigators