Errors in the written English of native users of sign language: An exploratory case study of Hong Kong deaf students

Thierfelder, Philip; Stapleton, Paul

doi:10.1016/j.system.2016.03.001

Cited by 10 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Literacy levels among deaf readers of English often fall behind those of their hearing peers (Mayberry et al, 2011). Although the phonemic nature of English and other alphabetic scripts could be an obstacle for deaf learners, educational achievement levels have pointed to similar difficulties in literacy acquisition among deaf readers of Chinese (Thierfelder & Stapleton, 2016). As Chinese is a non-phonemic script that is less closely tied to spoken language than English, it is unclear whether, or to what extent, deaf readers’ limited access to spoken phonology affects their acquisition of written Chinese.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Thierfelder

Wigglesworth

Tang

2020

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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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.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Thierfelder

Wigglesworth

Tang

2020

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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“…Indeed, there is much evidence that non-native users of a language (e.g., second language learners) also show structural priming in combinatorial arrangement of arguments around a lexical head (e.g., Shin & Christianson, 2012; for reviews, see Bernolet, 2017, andJackson, 2018). Thus, it is possible, that, like second language learners, deaf speakers can acquire lexically-embedded syntactic knowledge such as argument structures but may fail to attain native-like knowledge for syntactic properties that are not lexically embedded, such as morphological markings, articles, and auxiliaries (e.g., Marschark et al, 1994;Thierfelder & Stapleton, 2016).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, when a deaf speaker read or write, they are likely to also activate corresponding representations in their sign language (as a first/dominant language; e.g., Meade, Midgley, Sehyr, Holcomb, & Emmorey, 2017;Morford, Wilkinson, Villwock, Piñar, & Kroll, 2011;Thierfelder, Wigglesworth, & Tang, 2020a). Indeed, by examining written productions of English by deaf users Hong Kong Sign Language, Thierfelder and Stapleton (2016) showed that these writings contain linguistic errors (e.g., misuse of articles and count/mass nouns) that can be attributed to crosslinguistic influence from their first language, Hong Kong Sign Language.…”

Section: Written Language Production By Deaf Speakersmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Cai¹,

Zhao²,

Lin³

2021

Preprint

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It remains unclear whether deaf and hearing speakers differ in the processes and representations underlying written language production. Using the structural priming paradigm, this study investigated syntactic and lexical influences on syntactic encoding in writing by deaf speakers of Chinese in comparison with hearing controls. Experiment 1 showed that deaf speakers tended to re-use a prior syntactic structure in written sentence production (i.e., structural priming) to the same extent as hearing speakers did; in addition, such a tendency was enhanced when the target sentence repeated the verb from the prime sentence (i.e., lexical boost) in both deaf and hearing speakers to the same extent. These results suggest that deaf and hearing speakers are similarly affected by syntactic and lexical factors in syntactic encoding in writing. Experiment 2 revealed comparable boosts in structural priming between prime-target pairs with homographic homophone verbs and prime-target pairs with heterographic homophone verbs in hearing speakers, but a boost for prime-target pairs with homographic homophone verbs but not those with heterographic homophone verbs in deaf speakers. These results suggest that while syntactic encoding in writing is influenced by lemma associations developed for homophones as a result of phonological identity in hearing speakers, it is influenced by lemma associations developed for homographs as a result of orthographic identity in deaf speakers. In all, syntactic encoding in writing seems to employ the same syntactic and lexical representations in hearing and deaf speakers, though lexical representations are shaped more by orthography than phonology in deaf speakers.

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“…This has also been found to be the case for deaf bimodal bilinguals. Evidence of cross-linguistic influence of the signed first language (L1) on a second language or additional language (L2) has been found in studies of deaf reading (Meade et al, 2017; Morford et al, 2017; Pan et al, 2015; Thierfelder et al, 2020b) and writing (Thierfelder & Stapleton, 2016; Wolbers et al, 2014). Furthermore, linguistic knowledge in the signed L1 has been found to positively support the development of L2 literacy (Hoffmeister et al, 2021; Scott, 2022).…”

Section: Written Language Processing In Deaf Signersmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Cai¹,

Zhao²,

Lin³

et al. 2023

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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In three structural priming experiments, we investigated whether deaf and hearing writers differ in the processes and representations underlying written language production. Experiment 1 showed that deaf writers of Mandarin Chinese exhibited comparable extents of structural priming and comparable lexical boosts, suggesting that syntactic encoding in written language production is similarly sensitive to prior lexical–syntactic experience in deaf and hearing writers. Experiment 2 showed that, while hearing writers showed a boost in structural priming when the prime and the target had homographic or heterographic homophone dative verbs compared to unrelated ones, deaf writers showed a homophone boost only with homographic homophone verbs but not with heterographic homophone verbs. This finding suggests that while hearing people develop associated lemmas for homophones due to phonological identity, deaf people do so due to orthographic identity. Finally, Experiment 3 showed no boost in structural priming in deaf writers or hearing writers when the prime and the target had the same verb of the same orthography (i.e., in the same script) than of different orthographies (i.e., between Simplified and Traditional Chinese), suggesting that neither hearing nor deaf people use orthographic identity to reactivate the prime structure. In all, the findings suggest that syntactic encoding in writing employs the same syntactic and lexical representations in deaf and hearing writers, though lexical representations are shaped more by orthography than phonology in deaf writers.

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Errors in the written English of native users of sign language: An exploratory case study of Hong Kong deaf students

Cited by 10 publications

References 26 publications

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

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

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

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

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