An Analysis of Cognitive Studies With Deaf Subjects

Abstract

A new way of classifying tasks and problems used in studies with deaf people is presented. It is claimed that this classification system allows for the specification of tasks on which deaf people perform equally well as hearing people and of tasks on which they fail in comparison. The classification system is based on certain routines of steps which a subject is required to follow to show his/her understanding of the solution of nonverbal problems. These routines are identified by focusing on the very minimum of data needed by a person outside the experimental situation to decide whether a subject has shown his or her understanding of the solution of a problem. Deaf and hearing people perform equally well when required to show their understanding by referring to one of two such minimum data. The deaf perform worse when required to refer to both of two such data. It seems likely that the difficulties met by the deaf represent a fundamental communication problem which has its roots in the way the deaf are taught or trained.

Organization and use of the mental lexicon by deaf and hearing individuals

“…The results of Experiment 1 and McEvoy et al (1999) indicate that deaf students' conceptual knowledge generally is less coherent and consistent than hearing students'. Further, information processing at several levels (including memory for both printed text and sign language) among deaf adults and children tends to be focused on individual items rather than relations across items (Banks, Gray, & Fyfe, 1990;Ottem, 1980;Todman & Seedhouse, 1994). The finding that deaf students' performance on the analogy task used in Experiment 2 was significantly worse than that of hearing students therefore likely reflects differences in both knowledge of category membership and structure and task-appropriate use of relational processing (Liben, 1979).…”

“…They concluded that deaf students are less likely than hearing peers to activate superordinate information in such contexts. Alternatively, deaf students may not have any particular difficulty in automatically activating categorical information in response to exemplars, but may not spontaneously use that information to facilitate performance (Goswami, 1992;Liben, 1979;Ottem, 1980). Experiment 1 was designed to examine deaf students' use of taxonomic information more closely.…”

Evidence‐based practice in educating deaf and hard‐of‐hearing children: teaching to their cognitive strengths and needs

“…This section addresses the second: the finding that DHH students frequently fail to utilise knowledge we know they have or is made available in tasks for which it would be useful or is necessary (Ansell and Pagliaro 2006;Marschark and Everhart 1999;Ottem 1980). An early review by Ottem (1980) indicated that across dozens of experimental comparisons in concept learning, problem solving, memory, and classification, DHH and hearing children and adults performed similarly when tasks involved only a single stimulus dimension (e.g., sorting on number or colour). When correct responses required the integration or balancing of multiple dimensions (e.g., sorting on number and colour), in contrast, DHH individuals consistently performed worse than hearing age-mates.…”

SNARC hunting: Examining number representation in deaf students

“…Studies using word association tasks, for example, have revealed that deaf individuals tend to have weaker strengths of association between concepts, asymmetrical category-exemplar relations, smaller set sizes, and much more variable associative structures relative to hearing peers (Marschark, Convertino, McEvoy, & Masteller, 2004;McEvoy, Marschark, & Nelson, 1999). Deaf adults and children also have been shown to tend toward item-specific processing, focusing on individual item information rather than relations among items (Marschark, DeBeni, Palazzo, & Cornoldi, 1993;Ottem, 1980;Richardson, McLeod-Gallinger, McKee, & Long, 1999;see Marschark, 2003, for a review).…”