Vicki L. Hanson

Phonological coding in word reading: evidence from hearing and deaf readers

The ability of prelingually, profoundly deaf readers to access phonological information during reading was investigated in three experiments. The experiments employed a task, developed by Meyer, Schvaneveldt, and Ruddy (1974), in which lexical decision response times (RTs) to orthographically similar rhyming (e.g., WAVE-SAVE) and nortrhyming (e.g., HAVE-CAVE) word pairs were compared with RTs to orthographically and phonologically dissimilar control word pairs. The subjects of the study were deaf college students and hearing college students. In Experiments 1 and 2, in which the nonwords were pronounceable, the deaf subjects, like the hearing subjects, were facilitated in their RTs to rhyming pairs, but not to nonrhyming pairs. In Experiment 3, in which the nonwords were unpronounceable, both deaf and hearing subjects were facilitated in their RTs to both rhyming and nonrhyming pairs, with the facilitation being significantly greater for the rhyming pairs. These results indicate that access to phonological information is possible despite prelingual and profound hearing impairment. As such, they run counter to claims that deaf individuals are limited to the use of visual strategies in reading. Given the impoverished auditory, experience of such readers, these results suggest that the use of phonological information need not be tied to the auditory modality.

Short-term recall by deaf signers of American Sign Language: implications of encoding strategy for order recall.

Two experiments were conducted on short-term recall of printed English words by deaf signers of American Sign Language (ASL). Compared with hearing subjects, deaf subjects recalled significantly fewer words when ordered recall of words was required, but not when free recall was required. Deaf subjects tended to use a speech-based code in probed recall for order, and the greater the reliance on a speech-based code, the more accurate the recall. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that a speech-based code facilitates the retention of order information.

Web accessibility: a broader view

Web accessibility is an important goal. However, most approaches to its attainment are based on unrealistic economic models in which Web content developers are required to spend too much for which they receive too little. We believe this situation is due, in part, to the overly narrow definitions given both to those who stand to benefit from enhanced access to the Web and what is meant by this enhanced access. In this paper, we take a broader view, discussing a complementary approach that costs developers less and provides greater advantages to a larger community of users. While we have quite specific aims in our technical work, we hope it can also serve as an example of how the technical conversation regarding Web accessibility can move beyond the narrow confines of limited adaptations for small populations.

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

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.

Linguistic coding by deaf children in relation to beginning reading success

The coding of printed letters in a task of consonant recall was examined in relation to the level of success of prelingually and profoundly deaf children (median age 8.75 years) in beginning reading. As determined by recall errors, the deaf children who were classified as good readers appeared to use both speech and fingerspelling (manual) codes in short-term retention of printed letters. In contrast, deaf children classified as poor readers did not show influence of either of these linguistically based codes in recall. Thus, the success of deaf children in beginning reading, like that of hearing children, appears to be related to the ability to establish and make use of linguistically recoded representations of the language. Neither group showed evidence of dependence on visual cues for recall.

Determinants of spelling ability in deaf and hearing adults: Access to linguistic structure

Abstract The extent to which ability to access linguistic regularities of the orthography is dependent on spoken language was investigated in a two-part spelling test administered to both hearing and profoundly deaf college students. The spelling test examined ability to spell words varying in the degree to which their correct orthographic representation could be derived from the linguistic structure of English. Both groups of subjects were found to be sensitive to the underlying regularities of the orthography as indicated by greater accuracy on linguistically-derivable words than on irregular words. Comparison of accuracy on a production task and on a multiple-choice recognition task showed that the performance of both deaf and hearing subjects benefited from the recognition format, but especially so in the spelling of irregular words. Differences in the underlying spelling process for deaf and hearing spellers were revealed in an analysis of their misspellings: Deaf subjects produced fewer phonetically accurate misspellings than did the hearing subjects. Nonetheless, the deaf spellers tended to observe the formational constraints of English phonology and morphology in their misspellings. Together, these results suggest that deaf subjects are able to develop an appreciation for the structural properties of the orthography, but that their spelling may be guided by an accurate representation of the phonetic structure of words to a lesser degree than it is for hearing spellers.

Influencing technology adoption by older adults

With the advent of a digital economy, an emphasis on digital products and services has emerged. Those who are not using current technologies will become excluded, however, from this revolution. Older adults represent one such group in danger of exclusion. In some cases, older adults have been disinterested in new technologies. In other cases, however, the technologies fail to take into consideration the strengths and weaknesses of older users that would promote this usability. This paper examines components of information search by younger and older adults. These are considered in terms of long-term implications of designing for older users, with current problems viewed as foreshadowing future trends.

Engaging the disengaged: how do we design technology for digitally excluded older adults?

Amongst older adults, recent evidence suggests the most commonly stated reason for non-adoption of digital technologies is a lack of interest, rather than affordability or difficulty. This directly impacts upon the design community, both in terms of technologies we design for such groups to adopt, and the design methods we use for exploiting the untapped creativity and innovation amongst people who are not particularly interested in the outcome. This paper explores issues of technology non-acceptance amongst older adults, and reports on work designed to incorporate the values of older adults within the design process. We present the results of a series of interviews conducted with disengaged older adults, presenting the key themes found within a subset with these interviews.

Web access for elderly citizens

With elderly citizens becoming an increasingly large proportion of the population in many countries, social as well as economic considerations suggest that they must be considered in the development of current and future technologies. This paper addresses issues of Internet access, and discusses a research project designed to make the web more usable by elderly citizens. This project uses a proxy server to transcode web pages according to user-specified preferences and capabilities. Users access web pages as usual, with no specialized hardware required.

Recall of order information by deaf signers: Phonetic coding in temporal order recall

To examine the claim that phonetic coding plays a special role in temporal order recall, deaf and hearing college students were tested on their recall of temporal and spatial order information at two delay intervals. The deaf subjects were all native signers of American Sign Language. The results indicated that both the deaf and hearing subjects used phonetic coding in short-term temporal recall, and visual coding in spatial recall. There was no evidence of manual or visual coding among either the hearing or the deaf subjects in the temporal order recall task. The use of phonetic coding for temporal recall is consistent with the hypothesis that recall of temporal order information is facilitated by a phonetic code.