Cognition, Vol. 6, No. 3

Co~nirion,

6 (1978)

1

175187

Phonemic

effects in the silent reading of hearing and deaf children * JOHN

L. LOCKE

Institute for Child Behavior Champaign, Illinois

and Development

After I come back from school, my mother taught me how to read... she used both loud voice and clear lip movement... I was taught to form letter when read. Learn to read comes from orating. (Gibson, Shurcliff and Yonas,

1970,

p. 68.)

Abstract Twenty-four deaf and hearing children silently read a printed passage while crossing out all detected cases of a pre-specified target letter. Target letters appeared in phonemically modal form, a category loosely analogous to ‘pronounced” letters (e.g., the g in badge), and in phonemically? nonmodal form, a class which included “silent” letters and those pronounced in somewhat atypical fashion (e.g., the g in rough). Hearing children detected significantly more modal than nonmodal forms, an expected pronunciation effect for individuals in whom speech and reading ordinarily are in close functional relationship. The deaf detected exactly as many modal as nonmodal letter forms, provoking the interpretation that deaf children, as a group, do not effectively mediate print with speech. The deaf also were relative@ unaffected byagrammatical class, while hearing subjects were considerably more likely to detect a target letter if it occurred in a content word than a functor term. Questions pertaining to reading instruction in the deaf are discussed.

It is known that speech is important to reading (cf., Kavanagh, 1968; Kavanagh and Mattingly, 1972) but it is not clear whether this is so mostly during the years in which the child learns to read or, persistently, the seconds in *This work was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development through Grants HD-53445 and HI)4595 1. The deaf subiects were tested in 1973 when the author was a Research I~cllow in the Department of Psychology at Yale University. The author is indebted to the Mystic Oral School for the Deaf for furnishing subjects and space, to J. Lowden for composing the passage and running the deaf subjects, to L. Locke for assistance in the grammatical categorization of target words and to R. Conrad for comments on an early version of the manuscript. Requests for reprints should be addressed to John L. Locke, Institute for Child Behavior and Development, University of Illinois, 51 Gerty Drive, Champaign, Illinois 61820. OOlO-0277/78/0006-0189$2.25

0

Elsevier

Sequoia

S.A.,

Lausanne

Printed

in the

Netherlands

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John L. Locke

which the adult works his way from letters to meaning. It is apparent, though, that most proficient readers do something phonemic in their silent reading. One thing readers do, according to electromyographic studies (Hardyck and Petrinovich, 1970: McGuigan, 1970; Locke, 1971), is instruct the appropriate speech muscles to act - as if an audible pronunciation were forthcoming --though in the end there rarely is any visible or audible articulatory movement. Edfelt (1960) reports that nearly every reader does this ordinarily or can be induced to subvocally pronounce merely by decreasing the familiarity of the material or the clarity of the print. A second phonological effect in silent reading is observed when the reader takes longer to recognize or react to printed words (or, significantly, digits) whose “names” contain more syllables than other items of identical graphemic length (Eriksen, Pollack and Montague, 1970; Klapp, 197 1). A third phonemic effect in silent reading is revealed in the easy detection of rhyme (e.g., where sew-dough is chosen over clew-rolcglr and tour-hour) or the reader’s semantic resolution of anomalous word strings (e.g., where WEAK ANT MAY KIT + we can’t make it), both processes apparently involving auditory-phonetic imagery. That silent reading is phonemically sensitive is rather nicely illustrated by the several experiments of Corcoran (1966, 1967; Corcoran and Weening, 1968) and of McKay (1968), involving two slightly different tasks. In one, the reader searches through a prose passage for words spelled incorrectly; some are misspelled in a phonetically compatible way (e.g., hurd for heard), others in an incompatible fashion (e.g., borst for burst). In the other task, the reader identifies all instances of a predesignated letter (such as k) which in the test passage occurs in pronounced (e.g., keeping) and silent (e.g., knitting) forms. These studies show that readers are more likely to detect a misspelling if it is phonetically incompatible than if it is compatible, and are more likely to detect a letter if it is pronounced than if it is silent. Though experiments on readers’ dctcctiorzs of incorrectly spelled words clearly show phonemic effects, their results would be reinforced by a finding that writers’ gerzcratiom of misspellings also are phonetically constrained. In this connection, there is an interesting naturalistic study (Sears, 1969) which describes the spelling errors identified by the publications department of an aerospace company over a one year period. Of the 100 plus errors, over 92 percent were of the phonetic type (e.g., mztrge, priar), proving to the author that “engineers spell acoustically”. If silent reading were aided by phonetic processing, one might expect the deaf to read very poorly since their speech knowledge characteristically is limited. The expectation would be correct: surveysgenerally place the reading of 15-year-olds at about the third grade level, whether educated in the United

Phonemic effects in silent reading of children

177

States or Great Britain (Conrad, 1977). However, much of the linguistic basis for this may be due to deficits of syntax and vocabulary as well as phonology. There are several studies which suggest that many deaf children, unlike the hearing, may be more closely oriented to graphemes as visual stimuli than to the phonemes they conventionally represent or imply (Blanton, Nunnally, and Odom, 1967; BlantonandOdom, 1968; Lockeand Locke, 1971; Conrad, 1972a, 1973; Wallace and Corballis, 1973). On the basis of this, one might be tempted to posit a functional link between the tendency to recode graphemes phonologically and the ability to derive meaning from print. However, such an assumption would be too hasty for several reasons: (1) as mentioned, it has not been proved that phonological recoding is indispensibk to silent reading, (2) there are more speech coders among the deaf than there are good readers (cf., Conrad, 1972) and (3) the coding studies cited earlier were experiments in which deaf children had to recall serially unrelated strings of briefly exposed uppercase letters. Not approached was the question now asked here: when a deaf child goes from print to meaning, does he work through sound? Whether necessary or not, the hearing child is likely to consult the system of phonemes with which graphemes typically are linked. This is a possibility in the deaf child as well, at least if his speech is well developed and internalized, and the grapheme-phoneme correspondences are well known. Even given these contingencies, though, there would be no obvious benefit from phonological conversions unless the deaf child’s semantic system was phonologically based, surely a daring assumption in most cases. Alternatives, of course, are that the stages of print processing do not include a phonological recoding but instead rely upon some other system, perhaps one of shape cues or of implicit tingerspelling responses. These possibilities might be hard to identify, and it would be premature here to set down the experimental logic for doing so. Instead, this paper reports an attempt to determine whether the deaf are as phonemic in their silent reading as the hearing. In the experiment reported below, deaf and hearing children read a prose passage and in the process crossed out all instances they could find of certain designated letters. Where Corcoran’s (1966) letters were pronounced or silent, in the present experiment letters appeared in words whose pronunciations rendered the letters phonemically modal (e.g., the h in ahead = /h/) or phonemically nonmodal (e.g., the h in phone = /f/), a distinction to be elaborated later. It was assumed that letter detections would be greater in the modal cases only if the readers went from letter to phoneme and knew the operative pronunciation rules. If, however, the reader’s search was guided mainly by nonphonemic considerations, it was assumed the modal-nonmodal differences would largely be irrelevant, and that a letter’s detectability might be influenced instead by its orthographic environment - in some unknown

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John I>. Locke

ways, if at all - or by the linguistic class and information in which it appeared.

burden of the word

Method As mentioned above, this experiment studied the detectability of letters pronounced, because of their orthographic environment or because of custom, in a phonemically modal or nonmodal way. Phonemically modal forms are the particular instances of a letter in which the pronunciation involves a phoneme typically associated with the letter’s name. For example, where g commonly is understood to have “soft g” (i.e., /dg/) and “hard g” (i.e., /g/) variants, words such as rag and rage qualify as phonemically modal items. Nonmodal forms are cases in which a letter’s pronunciation involves phonemes not typically associated with the letter’s name. For example, the same letter, g, functions as a nonmodal form in words like rough (where g = /f/), ring (where g = /g/ and right (where g is “silent”, a phonemic zero). The modalnonmodal distinction permitted the use of a greater number of letters, words and grammatical categories - and the creation of a somewhat more coherent passage - than would have been possible, or as easily achievable, with the pronounced and silent categories. Materials

The prose passage used in the letter detection task was one-and-a-half pages in length, doublespaced, and it contained 472 words. The passage was typed with an IBM Selectric typewriter - whose element bore standard sans serif type - and was photocopied for distribution. The passage was composed by the deaf subjects’ reading teacher, who limited her vocabulary to words she knew were familiar to her students. Since she was constrained further by the need to include certain target words, the result was less than a literary masterpiece. A sample paragraph, the second of nine, conveys something of the story’s style, content and readability: Suddenly the phone rang. The cheerful little girl was so glad. She rushed to the kitchen to answer it. It was her grouchy mother. The next long call was a wrong number. Enough of that ! There were three target letters in the passage, c, g and h. Each letter occurred in modal and nonmodal form in nouns, verbs, adjectives and functors (adverbs, prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, determiners and participles). An attempt was made to distribute target letters across initial, medial and final word positions as much as possible without violating pronunciation and

Phonemic ejfects in silent reading of children

179

grammatical constraints. Table 1 shows the several phonemes presented by the three target letters in some words drawn from the passage for illustrative purposes. Silent letters constituted just eight percent of the nonmodal forms. There were 66 more target letters in the nonmodal category, an excess reflected in each of the four grammatical classes. The relative differences between modal and nonmodal frequencies for nouns, verbs and so forth were about the same for the three individual letters with the exception that the 34 the’s added disproportionately to the h count and greatly inflated the functor category. It is apparent from Table 1 that word position balancing was not completely successful, with few final letters in the modal set. Of the 290 target letters, 42 were in words which contained two target letters. Most of these two-target cases were ch (e.g., chilly, much) and gh (e.g., ghosts, caught) words which minimized semantic and grammatical variability in the analysis of performance on the three letters. Subjects The experimental group consisted of 24 1 l- to 16-yearold boys and girls enrolled at a residential school for the deaf. Their mean hearing level in the better ear for 500, 1000 and 2000 Hz was 95 dB (re ANSI, 1964). The school of education in which the considered itself “oral”, claiming a philosophy attainment of speech and lipreading proficiency was a primary goal’. The control group consisted of 24 12- to1 3-yearold hearing children enrolled in regular classes in a public school. All participants had normal or corrected-tonormal vision. Service in the experiment was voluntary and without formal reward. Procedures One third of the subjects in each group were assigned randomly to one of the three letters, c, g or h, which was written in the upper right hand comer of the first page of the passage. Subjects were asked to read the story, crossing out all cases of the designated letter as they did so. When finished, they were told, questions about the story would be distributed. Deaf subjects were run in groups of eight. As a consequence, the experimenter was able to write the target letter on the blackboard, showing what was to be done with several explicit examples. The hearing subjects were run in a single group. Consequently, each hearing child’s target letter was privately divulged and only neutral examples were given publicly. Otherwise, like the deaf, hearing subjects were instructed to cross out all instances of the desig‘Nevertheless, a number of students conversations outside the classroom.

were observed

copiously

fingerspelling

and signing

in their

180

John I,. Locke

Table 1.

Phonemic, grammatical and lexical characteristics their phonemically modal and nonmodal forms Phonemically Phoneme

modal N

letters

of the 290 target letters in

Phonemically

Examples

nonmodal N

Phoneme

letters Examples

c

lsl

7 23

lkl

city, race curly, because

32

I I

_

chair, marched machine back

34

30 R

Id Id
1). Hearing subjects displayed phonetic effects and grammatical effects to a much greater degree than did the deaf. Figure 1 shows the probability of a detection error for modal and nonmodal cases, collapsed across grammatical class. The hearing obviously approached the letter cancellation task phonemically; they were almost three times as likely to miss a nonmodal form (0.25) as they were to miss a phoFigure 1.

Probability of a failure to detect phonemically by hearing and deaf subjects. M=Modal N =Nonmodal

0 :rl

M

N

HEARING LETTER

M DEAF CLASS

N

modal and nonmodal

letters

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John L. Locke

Figure 2.

Probability of a fhilure to detect letters in verbs, noum, adjectives am' jimctars by hearing and deaf subjects. .40

V=Verb N=Noun A=Adjective F=Functor

.30

20

d

.I0

0I

V

N

F

DEAF

HEARING GRAMMATICAL

A

CLASS

nemically modal form (0.09). As a group, the deaf showed IZO modal-nonmodal difference (0.14 for both). Figure 2 shows the probability of a failure to detect letters in nouns, verbs, adjectives and functors, collapsed across pronunciation category. The hearing show a modest linear increase in error probability from verbs to nouns to adjectives, then a somewhat sharper increase for the functors’. The deaf, whose grammatical effect; were significantly less, were about as likely to miss a letter in a noun as they were to miss a letter in a verb or adjective, with a slight increase for the functors. Of the 34 occurrences of the, the deaf and hearing error probabilities were 0.176 and 0.477 respectively. Conrad (1972a, 1973) has found that some deaf students give clear evidence of phonological coding in short-term memory, others no evidence of it. He also has observed a relationship between phonological coding and speech quality, as have we (Locke and Locke, 1971). Accordingly, it seemed important to learn whether the deaf modal-nonmodal equivalence represented the average performance of two opposing groups of deaf children, one with relatively good, the other with relatively poor hearing or speech. An analysis of hearing subjects showed that 23, or 92 percent, committed larger proportions of error on nonmodal than on modal forms. Among the deaf, 13, or 54 percent. were more likely to miss nonmodal than modal forms. Is this just random variation or do these deaf subjects resemble the hearing in a way the “The verb-noun 1970, pp. 96-98).

relationship

- a particular

LXX of verb centrality

~ is discussed

claewhcre

(Chafe,

Phonemic effects in silent reading of children

183

11 other subjects do not? An analysis of audiometric records showed the “hearing-like” subjects to have approximately the same hearing loss (96 dB) as the 11 subjects who gave no evidence of a pronunciation effect (94 dB). However, a study by Chen (1976), which appeared during the writing of this report, suggests the tendency toward “phonemic reading” in the deaf may be linked to hearing sensitivity. Chen’s profoundly deaf group showed no significant pronouncedsilent gap for e detection while her hard of hearing and normal subjects did. If these group differences persist in future research, it will be interesting to see if they are due to variations in reading proficiency (Conrad, 1977) or speech quality, or to unequal tendencies toward the phonetic recoding of printed material (Conrad, 1973). To ensure that none of the modal-nonmodal difference within the two groups was due to variations in the position of target letters within words, a separate analysis was performed. The proportion of error at initial, medial and final positions was calculated separately for modal and nonmodal cases and these proportions simply were averaged. This procedure gave equal weight to each of the three positions, regardless of their differing number of cases. The results of this analysis show the deaf mean proportion to be 0.14 for modal and nonmodal categories, as was the case without adjustment for word position. The hearing remain at 0.09 error for modal letters, but they drop to 0.20 for nonmodal letters. Hence, the pronunciation effect, which now occurs in the hearing at a ratio of two to one, holds regardless of the location of the letters within words. The two groups also are seen to perform at approximately the same overall level (0.14 error) when word position effects are controlled in this way. There were 14 words which contained silent letters. Unfortunately for analytical purposes, these words were distributed across all three letters, two word positions and four grammatical classes. Consequently, few controlled comparisons of silent, modal and nonmodal forms were possible. However, these variables were controlled perfectly in five cases (all g; three medial-letter nouns, two medial-letter verbs) which occurred in-all three forms. In these cases, the hearing subjects showed a steady increase from modal (0.09) to non-modal-sounded (0.19) to nonmodalsilent (0.23). These data suggest that the pronounced-silent distinction of Corcoran (1966) is, indeed, a valid one, It is not, however, an experimentally necessary distinction; the modal to nonmodal-sounded increase is over 100 percent, large enough to reveal the pronunciation effect, with just a 21 percent increase from sounded to silent. The deaf, inexplicably, made the fewest errors where the hearing made the most though they, like the hearing, did do worse on nonmodalsounded than on modal items. Deaf error probabilities were nonmodal-silent: 0.20, modal: 0.25 and nonmodalsounded: 0.28.

Discussion It seems appropriate to begin the discussion with a mild caveut. Subjects in this experiment were asked to locate certain letters while they read, a rather unusual request. It is possible that in attempting to carry out the experimenter’s instructions our subjects relied upon phonemic strategy to a degree greater than children characteristically do in silent reading. However, the functional links between reading and speech mediation are so clearly established, and the pronunciation effect so robust, it seems unlikely that lettersearching encouraged anyone to perform a wholly unnatural phonological act. The lack of a pronunciation effect in the deaf children seen here, taken with the lack of reading proficiency in deaf children generally, seems to reinforce previous findings that speech mediation facilitates reading (Hardyck and Petri&vi&, 1969, 1970). An alternative, that poor reading ability is reflect& in the lack of pronunciation effects, seems less reasonable for several reasons. First, the deaf subjects in this experiment read a passage constructed specifically for them, a composition which took strict account of their word knowledge and structural sophistication. Second, recent research with hearing children shows that poor readers are less likely than good readers to recode letters and words phonetically, cwu if thel: ure able to read then? (Liberman, Shankweiler, Liberman, Fowler and Fischer, 1977; Mark, Shankweiler, Liberman and Fowler, 1977). Further, this difference probably is due not to dissimilar rehearsal proclivities or patterns but, instead, to a deficiency in the “accessing and use of a phonetic representation” (Mark et al.. 1977). There may have been some deaf children who silently spoke the passage but gave little evidence of it because their grapheme-phoneme rules were not correct or their phonetic executions sufficiently palpable, in lieu of auditory imagery, to signal the presence of a target letter. But there were many deaf subjects who gave no evidence of inner speech. In its stead they went from print to meaning directly or by way of some nonspeech system, the most likely contenders probably being a shape code or fingerspelling. Though proficient fingerspellers do evidence somewhat better reading scores than less proficient fingerspellers (Quigley, 1969), it is not known whether this is because they do anything dactylic as they read. As mentioned earlier. the deaf did better than hearing subjects in finding the /I in the various instances of tlrc. This is particularly interesting in view of recent evidence that words such as u/zd and tllc may be missed by the proficient reader, probably because he decodes print from phrase-sized chunks (Drewnowski and Healy, 1977). It is conceivable, in this connection. that the deaf differ from the hearing not only with respect to their reading .strafegies

Phonemic effects in silent reading of children

185

but also with reference to their reading units. Now if syntactic considerations can direct the reader’s attention to or away from certain words, then it should also be the case that some words get phonologically recoded, some not, based on the structure of the sentence in which they occur. This would indicate that models of reading should emphasize the interdependence of syntactic and phonological levels of processing, as do the data of hearing and deaf subjects seen here. One is primed by previous research to expect the deaf to be visually oriented, but even in the hearing one must assume the primacy of visual over phonemic characteristics. This is suggested by the total absence of false positives traceable to phonemic interference (e.g., where s or k were mistakenly identified in a search for c’s). But in the hearing one must assume that phonemic recodes are relatively potent, capable of enhancing or competing with preliminary decisions based on the visual form of letters. Recall that the hearing did better than the deaf on modal letters, worse than the deaf on nonmodal letters; and this is not the first time speech mediation has helped and harmed the performance of normal hearing subjects (Blanton and Odom, 1968; DomiE, Hagdahl and Hanson, 1973). In the deaf, of course, our assumptions must be different. One may suppose that deaf children are visually oriented, but there is little reason to believe they would spontaneously generate phonemic recodes of a force sufficient to confirm or counter the results of strictly visual analyses. Perhaps that is exactly why the deaf seem to be more sensitive to visual information than do the hearing. There is, after all, the remarkable observation that deaf children spell more accurately than hearing children (Gates and Chase, 1926; Templin, 1948). However, on close inspection it is apparent that much of the advantage is attributable to the markedly lower incidence of “phonetic” errors in the deaf (Hoemann, Andrews, Florian, Hoemann and Jensema, 1976). It is well documented that the deaf are poor readers, and it could be that many have a fairly fixed ceiling on their potential for reading achievement as currently educated. Studies in several countries and-at different times typically indicate that this limit is near the fourth grade level when the reader graduates from deaf high school. Since the deaf children in our population apparently did not uniformly work through or consult or happen upon phonology in going for the meaning, it might be valuable to know what they did do, and how much of thier present ceiling is due to what happened at that stage of the reading process. References Blanton,

R. L., Nunnally, J. C. and Odom, P. B. (1967) in the verbal behavior of deaf and hearing subjects.

Graphemic, phonetic, and associative .I. 5’~. Hear. Rex, 10, 225-23 1.

factors

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Blanton,

John

I>. Locke

R. L. and Odom, P. B. (1968) Some possible interference and facilitation effects of pronunciability. J. ver. I.earn. v. Beh., 7, 844-846. Chafe, W. (1970) Meaning and the Structure c?f‘Language, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press. Chen, K. (1976) Acoustic image in visual detection for deaf and hearing college students. J. g. Psychol., 94, 243- 246 Conrad, R. (19720) Short-term memory in the deaf: A test for speech coding. British J. Psychol., 63, 173.-180. Conrad, R. (1972b) Speech and Reading. In Kavanagh, .I. I’. and Mattingly, I. G. (Eds.), Language bv Ear and by Eye: The Relationships between Speech and Reading. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press. (‘onrad, R. (1973) Some correlates of speech coding in short-term memory of the deaf. J. Sp. flear. Res., 16, 375~384. Conrad. R. (1977) The reading ability of deaf school-leavers. British Journal of educat. Psychol., 47, 138~~148. Corcoran, D. W. J. (1966) An acoustic factor in letter cancellation. Nature, 1710, 658. Corcoran. D. W. J. (1967) Acoustic factors in proof reading. Nature, 1714. 851~G352. Corcoran. D. W. J. and Weening, D. L. (1968) Acoustic factors in visual search. Q. J. exper. Ps@zol., 20, 83 -85. Dorni;, S.. Hagdahl, R. and IIanson, G. (1973) Visual search and short-term memory in the deaf. Reports from the Institute ofApplied Psychology. The University of Stockholm, No. 38. Drcwnowski, A. and Healy. A. 1;. (1977) Detection errors on the and and: Evidence for reading units larger than the word. Mern. Cog., 5, 636 647, Edfelt, A. W. (1960) Silent Speech and Silent Reading, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Icriksen, C. W., Pollack, M. D. and Montague, W. I