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

Abstract

This study investigated serial recall by congenitally, profoundly deaf signers for visually specified linguistic information presented in their primary language, American Sign Language (ASL), and in printed or fingerspelled English. There were three main findings. First, differences in the serial-position curves across these conditions distinguished the changing-state stimuli from the static stimuli. These differences were a recency advantage and a primacy disadvantage for the ASL signs and fingerspelled English words, relative to the printed English words. Second, the deaf subjects, who were college students and graduates, used a sign-based code to recall ASL signs, but not to recall English words; this result suggests that well-educated deaf signers do not translate into their primary language when the information to be recalled is in English. Finally, mean recall of the deaf subjects for ordered lists of ASL signs and fingerspelled and printed English words was significantly less than that of hearing control subjects for the printed words; this difference may be explained by the particular efficacy of a speech-based code used by hearing individuals for retention of ordered linguistic information and by the relatively limited speech experience of congenitally, profoundly deaf individuals.Hearing individuals have been shown to use a speechbased code in the short-term recall of linguistic information, whether spoken or printed (Conrad, 1964;Wickelgren, 1965). Their recall performance is similar in the two cases except for a recency advantage favoring spoken over printed items in the last serial positions (Corballis, 1966;Murray, 1966). Because the orthography of English is a secondary representation derived from the primary or basic spoken language (Mattingly, 1972), it is not surprising that orthographic representations are recoded into a speech-based code. In addition, a speech-based code may This research was supported by Grant NS-180 10 from the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke and by Grant HD-OI994 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Some of the results were reported at the 91st Meeting of the American Psychological Association in Anaheim. California, in 1983. This study was made possible by the cooperation of Gallaudet College, and especially the members of the Gallaudet Linguistics Laboratory. We are also grateful to Nancy Fishbein and Carol Padden, whose expertise in ASL was of invaluable assistance in this endeavor. Many thanks to Robert Crowder, Carol Fowler, Arthur Glenberg, Louis Goldstein, Harriet Magen, Sharon Manuel, Ignatius Mattingly, James Nairne, Michael Studdert-Kennedy. D. H. Whalen, and an anonymous reviewer for valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper.The authors' mailing address is: Haskins Laboratories, 270 Crown Street, New Haven, CT 06511. be especially useful when the memory task calls for recall of ordered information (Baddeley, 1979;Crowder, 1978;Hanson, 1982;Healy, 1975),The relations among primary lan...

Effects of Age on the Temporal Organization of Working Memory in Deaf Signers

“…This effect can also been understood in terms of primary and secondary language codes with auditorily presented words (primary code) giving better recency than printed words (secondary code) which require recoding to primary code in WM (Shand & Klima, 1981). This explanation is supported from by findings from sign language where a recency advantage in deaf native signers has been found for signs over printed words (Bellugi, Klima & Siple, 1975;Krakow & Hanson, 1985). Serial position effects are also found for visually presented items that are not verbally encoded (Hay, Smith, Hitch & Norton, 2007; Smyth, Hay, Hitch & Norton, 2005).…”

“…There was no significant difference in the shape of the curves for the EDS and EHN. Previous work has shown that recency effects are modulated by the relationship between modality of presentation and preferred language that can be understood in terms of recoding to primary language modality (Bellugi, Klima & Siple, 1975;Hay, Smith, Hitch & Norton, 2007;Krakow & Hanson, 1985;Rönnberg, Archer & Ohlsson, 1980;Rönnberg, 1982;Shand & Klima, 1981;Smyth, Hay, Hitch & Norton, 2005). Thus, the similarity of the curves for EDS and EHN suggests that similar recoding from easily nameable pictures to primary language modality for both groups.…”

Looking through phonological shape to lexical meaning: The bottleneck of non-native sign language processing

“…Because such mistakes were related solely to sign phonology and completely divorced from sign and sentence meaning, they always resulted in a nonmeaningful response sentence. These phonological lexical changes are the same type of lexical errors as are reported to occur in short-term memory for isolated signs (Bellugi et al, 1975;Krakow & Hanson, 1985;.…”

“…In short-term recall of unrelated signs, signers make errors based on the phonological pattern of signs, rather than on the meaning of the signs to be remembered (Bellugi, Klima, & Siple, 1975;Krakow & Hanson, 1985;Poizner, Newkirk, Bellugi, & Klima, 1981). Signers engage in this phonological pattern recognition even when the phonological shape of the stimulus signs appears to consist of pictures (or mime) to naive observers (Poizner, Bellugi, & Tweney, 1981).…”

The effects of recoding and presentation format on recency and suffix effects

“…When ASL signs are presented for recall to profoundly and congenitally deaf, fluent users of ASL, recency (Krakow & Hanson, 1985;Shand & Klima, 1981) and suffix effects (Shand & Klima, 1981) are reported. Additionally, Campbell, Dodd, and Brasher (1983) taught a small set of ASL signs to high school students with normal hearing and reported large recency effects.…”