The Rhyming Skills of Deaf Children Educated with Phonetically Augmented Speechreading

Abstract

Two experiments investigated whether profoundly deaf children's rhyming ability was determined by the linguistic input that they were exposed to in their early childhood. Children educated with Cued Speech (CS) were compared to other deaf children, educated orally or with sign language. In CS, speechreading is combined with manual cues that disambiguate it. The central hypothesis is that CS allows deaf children to develop accurate phonological representations, which, in turn, assist in the emergence of accurate rhyming abilities. Experiment 1 showed that the deaf children educated early with CS performed better at rhyme judgement than did other deaf children. The performance of early CS-users was not influenced by word spelling. Experiment 2 confirmed this result in a rhyme generation task. Taken together, results support the hypothesis that rhyming ability depends on early exposure to a linguistic input specifying all phonological contrasts, independently of the modality (visual or auditory) in which this input is perceived.

Lateralization effects during semantic and rhyme judgement tasks in deaf and hearing subjects

“…The absence of left hemisphere superiority in deaf CS users is striking for two reasons. First, these subjects achieved a high level of rhyming, as attested by their high performance on the paper-andpencil control task in the present study, as well as by previous reports of good rhyming abilities in deaf CS users (Charlier & Leybaert, 2000;La Sasso et al, in press). Second, studies performed in normally hearing subjects using PET (De emonet et al, 1992(De emonet et al, , 1994 or fMRI (Fiez, 1997) have shown that phonological tasks induce strongly lateralised responses within the predominant hemisphere, within the cortical regions located around the Sylvian fissure, while the semantic component of word semantic judgment tasks is known to induce more bilateralised responses.…”

“…However, phonological information contained in visual speech reading is poorer, scarcer, and less precise than information based on auditory inputs for hearing people because many phonemes have similar labial images or no labial correlates. Deaf children exposed to CS early and intensively, who constitute a minority among the deaf community, constitute an exceptional case, in that they acquire a rich and precise phonological system, allowing them to perform accurately rhyming tasks (Charlier & Leybaert, 2000;La Sasso, Crain, & Leybaert, in press).…”

“…Finally, the rhyme constituent of the standard must be compared to the rhyme constituent of the target. The rhyme portion was spelt differently in nearly all the pairs, in order to avoid deaf subjects using a common strategy, which consisted that they based their decision on orthographic similarity (see Campbell & Wright, 1990;Charlier & Leybaert, 2000;Hanson & McGarr, 1989). In addition, the orthographic similarity between standard and target was held constant across rhyming and non-rhyming pairs.…”

Variability in deaf children's spelling: The effect of language experience.

“…school children, and showing that CS-home children reached greater accuracy in rhyming tasks than CS-school, SL-home, and SL-school children (Charlier & Leybaert, 2000;Leybaert, 2000). We also predicted that the effect of grapheme dominance would be intermediate in the CS-school groups and lower in SL groups.…”

“…& Daisey, 1992, andCharlier &Leybaert, 2000 for more complete descriptions of CS in English and in French, respectively, and Messing, 1999, for a discussion of the differences between CS and sign language [SL]). Children who have been exposed to CS early and intensively at home (i.e., CS-home children) develop a spelling production system strongly guided by phonology.…”