Does early exposure to spoken and sign language affect reading fluency in deaf and hard-of-hearing adult signers?

Frontiers in Psychology

Psychology

Anastasia A. Ziubanova¹  Anna K. Laurinavichyute²  Olga Parshina³ 

[1] Center for Language and Brain, HSE University, Moscow, Russia;Department of Linguistics, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany;Psychology Department, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT, United States;

关键词: reading fluency;    deaf;    hard-of-hearing;    sign language;    multimodal bilingualism;    scanpaths;    eye movements;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1145638

 received in 2023-01-16, accepted in 2023-08-31,  发布年份 2023

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

IntroductionEarly linguistic background, and in particular, access to language, lays the foundation of future reading skills in deaf and hard-of-hearing signers. The current study aims to estimate the impact of two factors – early access to sign and/or spoken language – on reading fluency in deaf and hard-of-hearing adult Russian Sign Language speakers.MethodsIn the eye-tracking experiment, 26 deaf and 14 hard-of-hearing native Russian Sign Language speakers read 144 sentences from the Russian Sentence Corpus. Analysis of global eye-movement trajectories (scanpaths) was used to identify clusters of typical reading trajectories. The role of early access to sign and spoken language as well as vocabulary size as predictors of the more fluent reading pattern was tested.ResultsHard-of-hearing signers with early access to sign language read more fluently than those who were exposed to sign language later in life or deaf signers without access to speech sounds. No association between early access to spoken language and reading fluency was found.DiscussionOur results suggest a unique advantage for the hard-of-hearing individuals from having early access to both sign and spoken language and support the existing claims that early exposure to sign language is beneficial not only for deaf but also for hard-of-hearing children.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
Copyright © 2023 Ziubanova, Laurinavichyute and Parshina.