Orthographic and phonological activation in Hong Kong deaf readers: An eye-tracking study

Abstract

We used an error disruption paradigm to investigate how deaf readers from Hong Kong, who had varying levels of reading fluency, use orthographic, phonological, and mouth-shape-based (i.e., “visemic”) codes during Chinese sentence reading while also examining the role of contextual information in facilitating lexical retrieval and integration. Participants had their eye movements recorded as they silently read Chinese sentences containing orthographic, homophonic, homovisemic, or unrelated errors. Sentences varied in terms of how much contextual information was available leading up to the target word. Fixation time analyses revealed that in early fixation measures, deaf readers activated word meanings primarily through orthographic representations. However, in contexts where targets were highly predictable, fixation times on homophonic errors decreased relative to those on unrelated errors, suggesting that higher levels of contextual predictability facilitated early phonological activation. In the measure of total reading time, results indicated that deaf readers activated word meanings primarily through orthographic representations, but they also appeared to activate word meanings through visemic representations in late error recovery processes. Examining the influence of reading fluency level on error recovery processes, we found that, in comparison to deaf readers with lower reading fluency levels, those with higher reading fluency levels could more quickly resolve homophonic and orthographic errors in the measures of gaze duration and total reading time, respectively. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical implications of these findings as they relate to the lexical quality hypothesis and the dual-route cascaded model of reading by deaf adults.

Syntactic encoding in written language production by deaf writers: A structural priming study and a comparison with hearing writers.

“…In contrast, deaf writers were boosted in structural priming when the homophone verbs were identical in orthography but not when they differed. These results are, on the one hand, consistent with previous findings that deaf writers are especially sensitive to orthographic information in reading (Bélanger et al, 2012(Bélanger et al, , 2013Fariña et al, 2017;Thierfelder et al, 2020a; and extend this conclusion to production. On the other hand, the results suggest that, despite findings that some deaf individuals access speech-based phonological representations in Chinese word reading (e.g., Thierfelder et al, 2020a;G.…”

“…These results are, on the one hand, consistent with previous findings that deaf writers are especially sensitive to orthographic information in reading (Bélanger et al, 2012(Bélanger et al, , 2013Fariña et al, 2017;Thierfelder et al, 2020a; and extend this conclusion to production. On the other hand, the results suggest that, despite findings that some deaf individuals access speech-based phonological representations in Chinese word reading (e.g., Thierfelder et al, 2020a;G. Yan et al, 2020;, syntactic choices in written language production are not influenced by the extent to which prime and target verbs share spoken phonology.…”

“…However, in both cases, these effects only emerged when fixation times on targets were relatively long, suggesting that phonological representations, even in skilled deaf readers, take time to develop and thus may not be involved in early word-access processes. In another eye-tracking study, Thierfelder et al (2020a) found that deaf signers of Hong Kong Sign Language, who had oral education backgrounds, activated speech-based phonological representations in late processing (measured by total fixation time) when reading (traditional) Chinese sentences, though overall there was a greater tendency toward direct activation of word meanings via orthographic codes.…”

Lexical and syntactic influences on syntactic encoding in written language production by deaf speakers

“…For instance, R. Wang et al, (2020) showed that, Chinese speakers are quicker at handwriting a Chinese character if the character has more regularity between its pronunciation and orthography (see more evidence below). For deaf speakers, there is evidence that they may have some (though limited) access to spoken language representations and these representations are activated in reading (Gutierrez-Sigut, Vergara-Martínez, & Perea, 2017;Hanson, 1989;Thierfelder, Wigglesworth, & Tang, 2020b;Wang, Trezek, Luckner, & Paul, 2008; see Mayberry, Del Giudice, & Lieberman, 2011, for a meta-analysis). For instance, in a lexical decision task, Gutierrez-Sigut et al (2017) showed that deaf readers (as hearing readers) were quicker at responding to a target (e.g., CORAL) preceded by a masked pseudo-homophone prime (e.g., koral) than by a masked orthographic control (e.g., toral).…”

“…What is much less clear is whether deaf speakers may be influenced by wordform (phonological and orthographic) information from prior language use. Regarding phonological influence, there is evidence that deaf speakers who do not produce spoken language nonetheless have some access to phonological representations in reading (e.g., Gutierrez-Sigut et al, 2017;Thierfelder et al, 2020b). However, it is also possible that the phonological information deaf speakers have access to is just too little for it to have any influence in written production at all.…”