Chinese deaf adolescents’ free recall of taxonomic, slot‐filler, and thematic categories

Abstract

Four experiments were conducted to show that deaf adolescents tended to process information in different ways from hearing adolescents. Memorizing items sequentially shown on computer screens under the control of their articulators' movements, deaf adolescents tended to treat items that cohered as taxonomic, thematic, or slot-filler categories as isolated pieces of information. Having to perceive information by means of sign language, however, their achievements were not worse than those of hearing adolescents anymore, no matter whether the stimuli were presented as words or pictures. They could not only utilize categories relations to help memorize categories exemplars but were relatively better aware of slot-filler or thematic than taxonomic relations as well, suggesting that they had a relatively delayed development of taxonomic category representations in comparison with hearing adolescents.

Korean deaf adolescents’ recognition of written words for taxonomic categories of different levels

“…In addition, deaf individuals organize their concepts in the same way as hearing individuals for the things that can be perceived easily through vision (Osberger & Hesketh, 1986). Deaf adolescents seemed generally similar to hearing adolescents in their awareness of typicality effect in a task of memory and free recall (Li & Zhang, 2009) and in tasks of conceptual categorization and false memory (Zhang et al ., 2008) with words or pictures for basic‐level exemplars as stimuli. Therefore, deaf Korean adolescents might be able to quickly recognize written words for ordinary concrete concepts, and they did have similar patterns of performance to those of hearing adolescents when exemplar words were presented after category names.…”

“…Deaf individuals tend to have differences in cognitive mechanisms compared with hearing individuals. For example, they have different styles of attentional orienting and selective attention (Bosworth & Dobkins, 2002), are more dependent on their visual‐spatial mechanism (Wilson & Emmorey, 1997), and tend to be more likely to treat conceptual entities in isolation (Li & Zhang, 2009) than hearing individuals. Deaf students’ difficulties with formal mathematics are apparently correlated with their reading abilities (Kelly & Gaustad, 2008), but the mechanism behind their delayed development of mathematics learning seems to be the result of their unique way of thinking.…”

“…Deaf individuals are not unable to have abstract concepts for taxonomic categories of super‐ordinate level, since, for example, they are able to be aware of typicality effect of exemplars in the same way as hearing individuals (Jerger et al ., 2006; Li et al ., 2009). They might need more resources and/or more processing time to fully activate the semantic representations for taxonomic categories of super‐ordinate level than for those of basic level.…”

“…Similarly, high school deaf students were able to instantiate particular exemplars of general nouns when asked to do so but did not do so spontaneously, probably because of their impoverished semantic representations, difficulty in integrating semantic representations, and insufficient strategy use (Strassman, Kretschmer & Bilsky, 1987). Deaf adolescents were aware of conceptual relations less than hearing adolescents between concepts represented by pictures or written words in memory tasks (Li & Zhang, 2009). When deciding whether four sequentially presented basic‐level exemplars were of the same taxonomic category or when first studying some words for basic‐level exemplars and then recognizing both the studied and some non‐studied words for exemplars of the same categories, their performance was poorer with exemplars of low typicality than with those of high typicality, which was different from hearing adolescents: They can be certain about the belongingness of taxonomic exemplars of high typicality, but they seemed less certain with those of low typicality (Zhang, Li & Wu, 2008).…”

Effectiveness of 5e-model of Instruction for Scientific Achievement: An Exploration of Age, Cognitive Domain and Ability Level of Students with Hearing Impairment

“…Science experiences can broaden the child's view about the environment through extensive use of physical and natural materials. Li & Zhang (2009) has shared that individuals with hearing impairment are working in every field of science. They are doctors, engineers, biologists and astronomers.…”