Hearing-impaired students learning new words from written context

Abstract

Normally hearing students acquire most of their reading vocabulary from printed context, but little is known about this process in hearing-impaired students. Two studies, therefore, investigated hearing-impaired students' ability to derive lexical and syntactic information about unknown words embedded in short passages of text. The passages varied in their informativeness about the meaning of the unknown words. Ability to derive at least a partial meaning for a word in context was determined both by the type of context and the reading comprehension levels of the students. However, there was no relationship between reading comprehension scores and ability to determine the form class of the words in context. The results are related to the importance of integrating semantic information into a meaning schema for the passage in order to acquire new meanings for unknown words and to the local strategies adopted by poorer readers when attempting to answer comprehension questions. Implications for explaining, and trying to ameliorate, the well-documented vocabulary limitations of hearing-impaired students are discussed.

Learning vocabulary in preschool: Social and discourse contexts affecting vocabulary growth

“…These initial representations can endure weeks after children hear new words used only once (Carey, 1978;Dickinson, 1984). A roughly similar picture of initial word learning has emerged from studies of incidental word learning resulting from reading (DeVilliers and Pomerantz, 1992;Jenkins, Stein, and Wysocki, 1984;Herman, Anderson, Pearson, and Nagy, 1987). Variables Affecting Word Learning.…”

“…Word learning also is conditioned by factors related to exposure: ( 1) more frequent exposure results in better learning (Drum and Konopak, 1987;Jenkins, Stein, and Wysocki, 1984;Rice, 1990;Sternberg, 1987); (2) learning is best when rich information regarding the word's meaning is provided, especially when the cues are close to the point when the word is encountered (Drum and Konopak, 1987;Rice, 1990;Sternberg, 1987); (3) learning can occur when a number of new words are introduced (Rice and Woodsmall, 1988), although presentation of too many new words at once can depress learning (Sternberg, 1987); (4) learning is best when children are able to comprehend fully the general passage in which the new word is encountered (DeVilliers and Pomerantz, 1992;Drum and Konopak, 1987); and (5) learning is enhanced when the word is encountered repeatedly in roughly similar grammatical contexts with similar meanings (Rice and Woodsmall, 1988).…”

A Summary of the Communication and Literacy Evidence-Based Practices for Students Who Are Deaf or Hard of Hearing, Visually Impaired, and Deafblind

“…Consequently, it is beneficial for professionals to identify ways to increase the vocabulary of students. Research has confirmed the benefits of teaching students high-frequency words (e.g., Easterbrooks, Lederberg, Miller, Bergeron, & Connor, 2008; Paul & Gustafson, 1991), introduction of key words using rich and explicit examples (e.g., de Villiers & Pomerantz, 1992), and instruction in inferential strategies to assist vocabulary development (e.g., Strassman, Kretschmer, & Bilsky, 1987). In addition, research has supported the use of repeated readings to improve students’ word recognition, reading rate, and comprehension (Ensor & Koller, 1997; Schirmer, Therrien, Schaffer, & Schirmer, 2009).…”

Deaf Readers as Bilinguals: An Examination of Deaf Readers’ Print Comprehension in Light of Current Advances in Bilingualism and Second Language Processing

“…Some researchers claim that deaf readers may rely on semantic and pragmatic information to compensate for syntactic knowledge gaps or processing limitations. For example, Gormley and Franzen (1978) suggested that deaf readers rely more on context and background information; Dalby and Letourneau (1991) reported deaf readers’ own intuition that they engage print as a primary linguistic system and derive meaning through pragmatic inferences and modality‐independent linguistic knowledge (cf., Kuntze 2004:184), and De Villiers and Pomerantz (1992) proposed that deaf readers encountering unfamiliar syntactic structures rely on vocabulary to interpret written text. More recently, Dominguez and Alegria (2010) argued that Spanish deaf readers exploited the so‐called keyword strategy to extract meaning from written text.…”