Short-term memory and coding strategies in the deaf.

Abstract

This thesis investigates short term memory processing in orally and manually trained deaf children, as well as in hearing controls. The first two experiments used visual presentation of four-and five-letter sequences. Results were analyzed in terms of the rehearsal strategies, encoding processes and confusions. The results showed not only that the deaf were inferior to the heari.ng, but that they encoded verbal material differently. Both deaf groups, in contrast to the hearing group who relied mainly on articulatory coding, made extensive use of visual coding with four-letter sequences. The evidence also suggested that with the fiveletter sequences, the orally-trained group used articulatory as well as visual coding, whereas the manu al group utilized some other secondary code, which May have been based in part on kinaesthetic cues. The third and final experiment studied the comparative performance of deaf and hearing children on recognition of pictures of faces. For this task, the deaf were superior to the hearing controls. The implica:tions of these findings for short term memory theorists and deaf educators"are discussed.

Visual and production similarity of the handshapes of the American manual alphabet

“…Two studies, one by Conrad and Rush (1965) and another by Wallace and Corballis (1973), examined short-term retention by deaf subjects with manual language experience (and published the raw confusion matrices needed here). Of these two, only the one by Wallace and Corballis included, in the stimulus set, a high proportion of letters found by our techniques to be manually similar."…”

Recall of order information by deaf signers: Phonetic coding in temporal order recall

“…The first is the use of phonetic coding among the deaf subjects. Previous research has indicated that deaf subjects who do not show evidence of the use of phonetic coding tend to recall fewer items than hearing subjects who do use phonetic coding (e.g., Conrad & Rush, 1965;Wallace & Corballis, 1973). The accuracy of deaf subjects may also be less even when phonetic coding is used, although there is evidence that as deaf subjects' use of phonetic coding increases, their temporal recall accuracy improves (Conrad, 1979;Hanson, 1982;Hanson & Lichtenstein, 1990).…”

“…Evidence consistent with this claim has been obtained repeatedly (for a review, see Cumrning & Rodda, 1985). In tasks requiring the serial recall of linguistic stimuli (whether words, digits, signs, fingerspelling, or pictures), deaf subjects have consistently been found to recall fewer items than hearing subjects, even when confounds with spatial order recall have been eliminated (e.g., Bellugi, Klima, & Siple, 1975;Blair, 1957;Hanson, 1982;Krakow & Hanson, 1985;McDaniel, 1980;Pintner & Paterson, 1917;Wallace & Corballis, 1973;Withrow, 1968). However, in the temporal recall of nonsense stimuli, deaf subjects have not been found to recall fewer items than hearing subjects (McDaniel, 1980;Olsson & Furth, 1966).…”

Deaf signers and serial recall in the visual modality: Memory for signs, fingerspelling, and print

“…In general, when congenitally, profoundly deaf individuals perform a task that calls for ordered recall of English words or letters, they do not perform as well as hearing subjects (Belmont & Karchmer, 1978;Belmont, Karchmer, & Pilkonis, 1976;Hanson, 1982;MacDougall, 1979;Wallace & Corballis, 1973). Belmont and Karchmer argued that the generally poorer performance of deaf individuals reflects a "mismatch" between the native language (ASL) and the language of the information to be recalled (English).…”