ABSTRACT

This study explored differences between the two hemispheres in processing written words among deaf readers. The main hypothesis was that impoverished phonological abilities of deaf readers may lead to atypical patterns of hemispheric involvement. To test this, deaf participants completed a metalinguistic awareness test to evaluate their orthographic and phonological awareness. Additionally, they were asked to read biased or neutral target sentences ending with an ambiguous homograph, with each sentence followed by the request to make a rapid lexical decision on a target word presented either to the left (LH) or right hemisphere (RH). Targets were either related to the more frequent, dominant, meaning of the homograph, to the less frequent, subordinate, meaning of the homograph or were not related at all. An Inverse Efficiency Score based on both response latency and accuracy was calculated and revealed that deaf readers’ RH perform better than their LH. In contrast to hearing readers who in previous studies manifested left hemisphere dominance when completed the same research design. The apparent divergence of deaf readers’ hemisphere lateralization from that of hearing counterparts seems to validate previous findings suggesting greater reliance on RH involvement among deaf individuals during visual word recognition.

摘要

这项研究探讨了两个半球在聋哑读者之间处理文字的差异。主要假设是，聋哑读者的语音能力下降可能导致半球参与的非典型模式。为了测试这一点，聋哑参与者完成了元语言意识测试，以评估他们的拼字和语音意识。此外，还要求他们阅读以歧义的同形异义词结尾的有偏见或中立的目标句子，每个句子后面都要求对呈现给左（LH）或右半球（RH）的目标单词做出快速的词汇判定。目标要么与同形异义词的频率较高，占主导地位的含义相关，要么与同形异义词的频率较低，下属含义相关，或者根本不相关。计算了基于响应潜伏期和准确性的逆效率得分，结果表明，聋哑读者的RH表现优于其LH。与之前完成研究设计时表现出左半球优势的听觉读者相反。聋人阅读者的半球偏侧与听力同伴的明显差异似乎证实了先前的发现，这表明在视觉单词识别过程中，聋人个体对RH的依赖性更大。