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J. COMMUN. DISORD. 20 (1987), l-13
THE INSTANTIATION OF GENERAL TERMS BY DEAF ADOLESCENTS/ADULTS BARBARA
K. STRASSMAN
Trenton State College
ROBERT E. KRETSCHMER
and LINDA H. BILSKY
Columbia University
Two studies were conducted using severely and profoundly deaf high school students to determine their ability to instantiate particular exemplars of general nouns and to use those instantiations as retrieval cues. The results indicated that (1) the deaf adolescents/adults could instantiate when asked to do so but did not do so spontaneously; (2) sentence recall was best when the retrieval cue matched the word used in the original sentence; and (3) recall of sentences in which all information was explicit was better than of sentences in which some information had to be inferred. Impoverished semantic representations, difficulty in integrating semantic representations, and insufficient strategy use were suggested as possible alternative and competing explanations for the obtained results.
INTRODUCTION The instantiation hypothesis, a suggested explanation of one inferential comprehension process, was proposed by Anderson, Pichert, Goetz, Schallert, Stevens, and Trollip (1976). It is based on a schematic representation of semantic memory in which words are represented by a set of characteristic features. Not all of these features, however, are necessarily common to each sense of a given word (Smith, Shoben, and Rips, 1974). Thus, the hypothesis maintains that words have a “family” of potential meanings. Instantiation is the process by which a particular meaning appropriate to a given context is accessed or inferred. The instantiation process requires the constructive use of categorical relationships. This hypothesis has been tested by Anderson et al. (1976) in a cued sentence-recall task with adults. Sentence pairs, using identical subject noun phrases, were designed to encourage diverse interpretations of the subject noun. The context of one sentence, “The boy earned a merit badge. “, was structured to encourage the instantiation of a particular noun Address correspondence to Robert E. Kretschmer, Ph.D., Teachers College, Columbia University, Department of Special Education, Box 223, New York, NY 10027. 8 1987by Elsevier Science Publishing Co., Inc. 52 Vanderbilt Ave., New York, NY 10017
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B. K. STRASSMAN et al.
(e.g., the scout). The context of the other sentence, “The boy saw the policeman’s badge.” was structured to encourage a more generic interpretation of the general category noun phrase included in both sentences (e.g., the boy). Anderson et al. found that for college students a particular cue (the expected instantiation) produced better recall of a target sentence than did the general term actually used in the sentence. For example, “scout” was a better retrieval cue than “boy” for the sentence, “The boy earned a merit badge.” The context of the control sentence, “The boy saw the policeman’s badge.” did not encourage the instantiation of a specific meaning of the word “boy.” Consequently, the general cue “boy” was a more effective retrieval cue for the control sentence. Using sentences as the contextual frame, the findings of Anderson et al. (1976) provided support for the instantiation hypothesis with nouns. Garnham (1979) extended the generality of this finding, reporting that college students also instantiate the meanings of verbs within a sentence. Gentner (1981) demonstrated the instantiation of verb meanings across sentences in a passage. These studies, as well as others, support the notion that comprehension and memory processes in adults are constructive and inferential (Anderson and McGaw, 1973; Anderson and Ortony, 1975; Barclay, Bransford, Franks, McCarrell, and Nitsch, 1974). Recent studies with youngsters have examined children’s constructive and inferential processes in light of the instantiation hypothesis. Anderson, Stevens, Shifrin, and Osbom (1978) reported that first and fourth graders can select a picture of the expected instantiation of a sentence’s object noun. In a cued sentence-recall task Dreher (1981) observed that fifth, sixth, and eighth graders used general and particular cues equally effectively as retrieval aids for target sentences. Bilsky, Walker, and Sakales (1983), in a study involving fourth graders and mildly retarded adolescents, made an observation similar to that of Dreher’s. While, in children, particular cues are not superior to general cues as recall aids, their equal effectiveness suggests that some constructive processing is occurring (Bilsky et al., 1983). The emerging picture seems to be that with age, children develop the constructive and inferential comprehension and memory processes used by adults (Paris and Lindauer, 1976, 1977; Paris and Carter, 1973; Bilsky et al., 1983). The purpose of the present research was to examine the constructive and inferential processes of deaf adolescents/adults in light of the instantiation hypothesis. High school students were selected for this research for several reasons. First, based on studies conducted by Hammermeister (1971), by DiFrancesca (1972), and by Trybus and Karchmer (1977) the present researchers felt that the high school age group would adequately reflect the abilities of typical adult deaf readers. Hammermeister (1971) compared Stanford Reading Achievement test scores obtained during the final high school year of 60 students with scores obtained when the same
INSTANTIATION
OF GENERAL TERMS
3
test was readministered 7 to 13 years later. While the results indicated significant gains on the test of Word Meaning, these gains were of less than one grade level for students who had not gone on to at least one year of college. For the 10 students who had attended college, a slightly larger gain was found. No significant gains were found for either group on the test of Paragraph Meaning. DiFrancesca (1972) examined test scores for approximately 17,000 deaf students (ranging in age from 6 to 21 years) on the Stanford Achievement Test. The highest mean grade equivalent score on the Paragraph Meaning subtest was 4.3 at age 19, and the average rate of growth was 0.2 grade levels per year of schooling. More recently, Trybus and Karchmer (1977) found similar results based on a stratified random sample of almost 7,000 deaf students. In addition, they found that only 10% of the best reading group could read at or above the 8th grade level. The combined results of these studies suggest that high school hearing-impaired students are reading at or just slightly below the level at which typical deaf adults read. An additional reason for using high, school students was that an examination of school records enabled the researchers to ensure that all participants met predetermined criteria (normal intelligence, reading at or above third grade level, no secondary handicap, hearing parents, prelingually deaf, severe to profound hearing loss). Two questions were investigated: (1) When directed to do so, would deaf adolescent/adult readers instantiate general terms in sentences they read? and (2) In sentences they read, would deaf adolescent/adult readers spontaneously instantiate particular instances of general terms? If both questions were answered affirmatively, then the applicability of the instantiation hypothesis, which has been supported with mature hearing readers, may be extended to deaf adolescent/adult readers. Findings from three areas of research suggest that this may not be the case. First, it has been well documented that the reading achievement levels of deaf individuals are significantly below achievement levels of comparable hearing groups (DiFrancesca, 1972; Trybus and Karchmer, 1977; Conrad, 1979). As measured by the Stanford Achievement Test, the national median reading score for 20-year-old deaf students has been noted to be at a grade equivalent of 4.5 (Trybus and Karchmer, 1977). Owing to the nature of low-level reading materials, it is possible that the average adolescent/adult deaf reader may not have had experience with the variety of demands made by higher-level reading materials. Consequently, it is possible that the average adolescent/adult deaf reader may not be practiced in employing constructive and inferential processes when reading. Secondly, several studies comparing the hearing-impaired child and the normally hearing child’s ability to generate word meanings and associations of isolated words have found that hearing impaired individuals (1)
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et al.
are less accurate in their definitions of words (Silverman and Rosenstein, 1969), (2) tend to use associations rather than critical semantic features to define words (Silverman and Rosenstein, 1969), (3) have great difficulty in differentiating synonymous relationships from other associative relationships (McGettigan and Rosenstein, 1969; MacGinitie, 1969), and (4) show little growth in their ability to generate specific instances of a category (Restaino, 1969; Fremer and MacGinitie, 1969). Instantiation is predicated on semantic representations which have well-defined sets of word definitions, clearly articulated concepts, and a variety of specific connections between and among words. These studies, in contrast to those investigating the verbal categorical and clustering abilities of deaf youngsters (Hoemann, Andrews, and DeRosa, 1974; Tweney, Hoemann, and Andrews, 1975; Liben, 1979), would seem to suggest that hearing impaired individuals do not have a sufficiently rich or defined semantic base from which to construct or infer word meanings spontaneously. Thirdly, in the completion of cloze passages, hearing impaired youngsters seem to gain only minimal clues from context (Cohen, 1967; Moores, 1967; Marshall, 1970). Instantiation, like the completion of a cloze passage, is dependent upon use of context. EXPERIMENT
1
Method Subjects. Twenty-two deaf subjects were drawn from a Total Communication high school program for the deaf housed in a New Jersey public school. The ages of the subjects ranged from 13-4 to 20-2, with a mean age of 17-6 and a standard deviation (S.D.) of l-9 years. According to the school records, all of the subjects were of average intelligence. For eighteen of the subjects, performance scores on the WAIS or WISC ranged from 86 to 121 with a mean of 103.1 and a S.D. of 12.2. No scores were available for three of the subjects. (Their placement in the regular school program indicated that they were of normal intelligence.) Reading comprehension grade-equivalent scores were based on a recent administration of the Stanford Achievement Test. Reading comprehension scores ranged from 3.0 to 7.4 with a mean reading level of 5.2 and a S.D. of 1.1. All of the subjects were prelingually deaf and had no diagnosed secondary handicap. They were all classified as severely to profoundly deaf with a hearing loss of 85 dB (ANSI) or above in the better ear. Eight boys and fourteen girls participated.
Design. The purpose of this experiment was twofold: (1) to determine if deaf readers could instantiate when directed to do so and, (2) to select appropriate stimuli for Experiment 2. Response frequencies were therefore tabulated.
INSTANTIATION
OF GENERAL TERMS
5
Materials. Thirty-six pairs of sentences were constructed such that each pair contained a target sentence and a control sentence. Twentyseven of the pairs were obtained from Dreher (198 1) and four of the pairs were obtained from Bilsky et al. (1983). Target sentences were intended to elicit one particular example of the noun phrase, whereas control sentences were written simply to connote the generic instance of the noun phrase. For example, the target sentence “The woman helped the children with their math work.” was paired with a control sentence containing the identical subject noun phrase and identical last word, “The woman rode the bus to get to work.” For this example, it was intended that the target sentence would elicit the instantiated meaning of “teacher” for the phrase “the woman” while the control sentence would not lead to any one particular example of the subject noun phrase. In addition, for each pair of sentences a question about the subject noun phras: contained in the pair was generated. For the above pair of sentences the related question was “What woman does this sentence make you think of?“. Eighteen questions, one per pair of sentences, were developed. Procedure. The sentence pairs were split and randomly assigned to two lists of 36 sentences each. The lists were counterbalanced so that half of the sentences on each list were control sentences and half target. Each list of sentences was presented in a booklet, with one sentence, and its related question, per page. Subjects were randomly assigned to one of the two lists and were tested in one group. They were instructed to write their answer in the space next to the question. Three examples were done as a group to affirm that the students understood the task. In discussing the examples the examiner highlighted the categorical relationship between student responses and the general noun phrase of the stimulus. Responses of a different category were presented by the examiner to demonstrate that they were incorrect. While the youngsters were instructed to give one answer to each question, the examiner emphasized that a question might have several correct responses, as long as each was of the same category as the general noun phrase. The youngsters worked through the booklets at their own pace.
Results and Discussion The participants’ responses to questions regarding the subject noun phrases of the test stimuli were tabulated. Of particular interest was the number of times the expected instantiation was given for either type of sentence and the number of times the subjects did not give a response. Response frequencies are given in Table 1. As indicated by the number of times the subjects gave the expected instantiation for the target sentences (70.16%), the present study verified
6 Table 1. Response Experiment 1
B. K. STRASSMAN Frequencies
Expected instantiation Other responses No response Out of category
(in Percent)
by Type of Sentence
et al.
for
Target
Control
70.16 22.51 2.88 4.45 100%
17.83 65.89 4.13 12.15 100%
that when directed to do so, the participants could use sentential context as an aid in inferring particular meanings of general terms. The low number of no responses (4.13% for control sentences and 2.88% for target sentences) combined with the high rate of instantiation further indicated that the youngsters were familiar with the vocabulary being used, that they knew the categorical relationships required by the task and that they could make the required associations. Overall, the youngsters gave relatively few responses that were uninterpretable or out of category (12.15% for control sentences and 4.45% for target sentences).
EXPERIMENT
2
Method Subjects. Twenty-one of the subjects from Experiment 1, conducted 2 months earlier, participated in the present experiment. One subject was dropped because she experienced difficulty in completing the first experiment. There were no significant changes in the sample’s characteristics after dropping the one subject. Design. A 3 x 2 mixed factorial design was used. The first withinsubjects factor was sentence type (target versus control versus exemplar). The second within-subjects factor was cue type (particular versus general). Seven of the 21 subjects received each of the three sentence-lists and each of the three cue-lists. Sentence-lists and cue-lists were randomly assigned to each of the subjects. The dependent variable of primary interest was correct gist recall. Materials. In Experiment 1, 36 pairs of related sentences, consisting of a control and a target sentence, were used. Stimuli for Experiment 2 were chosen from these pairs. Criteria for stimulus selection for Experiment 2 were that (1) for the target version the expected instantiation was given at least 75.0% of the time, while (2) for the control version of the sentences, the expected instantiation was given no more than 8.0% of
INSTANTIATION
OF GENERAL
TERMS
7
the time. Based on these frequencies, 10 sentence pairs were selected for use in the present study. Each selected pair was then extended by adding a third sentence, thus forming sentence triples. The added sentence, called an exemplar, was formed by replacing the subject noun phrase of the target sentence with the expected instantiation. The following are examples of control, target, and exemplar sentences respectively: “The woman rode the bus to get to work.“, “The woman helped her students with their math work.“, and “The teacher helped her students with their math work.” The 10 sentence triples and related cues used in Experiment 2 are listed in Table 2.
Table 2. Sentences
and Cues Used in Experiment
2” Cues
Sentences
Particular
The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The
ship sailed across the water. ship moved underneath the water. submarine moved underneath the water. fish swam away from the swimmer. fish attacked the swimmer. shark attacked the swimmer. building was closed every Sunday. building was used every Sunday. church was used every Sunday. fruit had a sweet taste. fruit had a sour taste. lemon had a sour taste. cowboy shot the animal in the desert. cowboy rode the animal through the desert. cowboy rode the horse through the desert. woman rode the bus to get to work. woman helped the children with their math work. teacher helped the children with their math work. person watered the garden with a hose. person ran into the burning building with a hose. fireman ran into the burning building with a hose. insect crawled by the girl. insect stung the girl. bee stung the girl. man built a model airplane. man flew the airplane. pilot flew the airplane.
The The The The
following sentence triplet was not included in the statistical analyses: noise came from the other‘ side of the wall. Ring noise came from the phone on the wall. ring came from the phone on the wall.
’ Note: Sentences are listed in order: control, target, exemplar.
General
Submarine
Ship
Shark
Fish
Church
Building
Lemon
Fruit
Horse
Animal
Teacher
Woman
Fireman
Person
Bee
Insect
Man
Noise
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et al.
Procedure. The 10 sentence triples were split and randomly assigned to one of three lists so that the members of a triple were on different lists. The lists were counterbalanced for sentence type. Each list was presented in a booklet, one sentence per page. The subjects were randomly assigned to the three sentence list conditions. Students were tested in one group. They were instructed, in Total Communication (i.e., simultaneously in verbal language and in sign language), to read and to remember the sentences because they would be asked to recall the sentences later. Students had a light on their desk. When the light flashed they were to turn the page of the booklet. The light was timed to give 12 set per sentence. The 12-see rate took into account the average sentence length and average necessary reading time for that length sentence (Taylor, Frackenpohl, and Pettee, 1960). Following the sentences, the students were engaged in a 5min interpolated task consisting of math computation problems. The students were then given a cued recall test. For each sentence, the students were given two types of cues: the expected instantiation (particular cue) and the subject noun of the target and control sentences (general cue). The 20 cues were divided into two block orders such that the related particular and general cues were not in the same block. Half the cues in each block were particular cues and half general cues. There were three random orders for each block and block order was counterbalanced. The subjects were randomly assigned to a cue list order. The cues were presented in a booklet, one cue per page. Students were instructued to read the word and write the sentence of which it made them think. The students were told that they could write the same sentence more than once. The youngsters worked at their own pace. Scoring. One triplet, and its two related cues, were dropped from the study in order to allow each subject to be scored for responding to an equal number of sentences of each sentence type. The subjects were thus scored on 18 responses to 9 sentences, with 3 cues representing each sentence type x cue type combination. A response was given credit if it maintained the gist meaning of the original sentence. Except for the initial noun phrase, synonyms, close synonyms, and hyponyms for all words in the sentence were accepted. For example, if a student saw the sentence “The submarine moved underneath the water.” and wrote “The submarine rode underneath the water.” the response was marked as correct. Provided the gist meaning was maintained, sentences missing words were also marked as correct. “The insect crawled the girl.” was therefore accepted for “The insect crawled near the girl.” Because two of the general cues were similar in category (“man” and “person”), responses that interchanged the general
INSTANTIATION
OF GENERAL
TERMS
or particular cues for those sentences were also given credit. Responses that consisted of only a phrase were not given credit. Independent ratings of the data were completed by two raters. Interrater reliability was quite high (r = 0.98). Disagreement was negotiated by the raters in order to obtain a single set of scores to be used in the analyses. Results and Discussion Overall, the participants in the present study demonstrated a poor rate of recall: 27.22% of the cues were responded to correctly, 10.31% of cues were responded to incorrectly, 29.62% of the cues received no response, and 32.3% of the cues received an invented response. Of the correct responses almost half (43.80%) were for exemplar sentences. The gist recall scores were subjected to a 2 (cue) x 3 (sentence) factorial analysis of variance with repeated measures on both factors. This analysis indicated a significant main effect for sentence type (F = 4.04, 2/40 df, p < 0.05)and a significant cue by sentence type interaction (F = 28.78, 2/40 df, p < 0.01). The percent of correct gist recall within conditions is shown in Table 3. Tukey post hoc comparisons for pairwise differences among sentence type means showed that exemplar sentences were better recalled than either control or target sentences. There was no difference in recall between control and target sentences. In interpreting this result it is necessary to keep in mind that the sentences each had 2 or 3 propositions and were of approximately equal length. For these reasons, each sentence should have had the same chance of being recalled (Kintsch, 1975). Yet, the subjects showed an advantage in remembering sentences in which relationships are stated explicitly (exemplar sentences) over sentences in which the relationships are implicit (target and control sentences). The present findings are similar to those reported by Paris and Lindauer (1976) for young children. Paris and Lindauer found that young children often failed to construct and remember inferred relationships that they were capable of understanding. However, when the youngsters in their
Table 3. Percent of Correct Gist Recall Responses Cue Type Conditions for Experiment 2
within Sentence
Type x
Sentence type Cue type
Control
Target
Exemplar
Particular General
11.11 38.09
6.34 38.09
63.49 9.52
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B. K. STRASSMAN
et al.
study were forced to generate the inferential relationships, they were able to utilize that information to facilitate recall. In the present study, the subjects also failed to spontaneously construct and remember inferential relationships for which they demonstrated understanding in Experiment 1. When however, those relationships were generated for the subjects (as in exemplar sentences), they were able to utilize that information to facilitate recall. The cue type by sentence type interaction was explicated by using tests for simple effects. These tests indicated a significant difference between particular and general cues for each type of sentence: general cues were better retrieval aids for control and target sentences (p < 0.0.5>, while particular cues were better for exemplar sentences (p < 0.01). This finding suggests that hearing impaired readers do not generally instantiate spontaneously. If instantiation had occurred, then as retrieval aids for target sentences, particular cues should have been at least as effective as general cues (Anderson et al., 1976; Dreher, 1981; Bilsky et al., 1983). Yet the findings of the present study seem to indicate that the subjects did not spontaneously construct and remember the inferred relationships of which previously (in Experiment 1) they had demonstrated understanding. Rather, the present results show that the most effective retrieval cue was that which corresponded to the phrase actually read. There are at least two possible explanations for the present results. First, it may be that owing to their overall low reading level (mean = 5.2) the subjects are used to verbatim recall comprehension activities. The large percentage of no responses might further indicate that the subjects perceive recall as an explicit verbatim task. At low reading levels comprehension tasks frequently demand only factual recall (Wilson, 1979). The subjects, owing to insufticient experience, may not yet have developed strategies for inferring implicit information from text. Hence, they may be overly relying on word-by-word strategies (bottom-up processes) at the expense of top-down or semantic strategies. Alternatively, it is possible that while the subjects were able to generate semantic representations of the individual stimulus words, the strength of the associations among and between those individual representations was insufficient to be spontaneously productive. This would limit the ability to use context as an aid in comprehension (Cohen, 1967; Moores, 1967; Marshall, 1970). Thus, in Experiment 1 the subjects could make the required associations; however, the task directed them as to which association had to be made. Failure to independently make these connections in Experiment 2 might therefore indicate weak or ill-defined associations (Silverman and Rosenstein, 1969; McGettigan and Rosenstein, 1969; Fremer and MacGinitie, 1969). The advantage shown in remembering exemplar sentences over target and control sentences supports this possibility.
INSTANTIATION OF GENERAL TERMS
11
Gentner (1981) has suggested a three-stage semantic integration model that offers a framework for these possible explanations and for future study. At the first stage, the meanings of individual units are individually analyzed during comprehension into structural representations of meaning. During the second stage incoming propositions are compared for overlap of componential structure. Then, at the third stage, overlapping structures are combined into a discourse network according to their degree of overlap. The present findings suggest that stages 2 and 3 are problematic for deafadolescent/adult readers. While stage 1 was not addressed in this study, evidence from other studies (Silverman and Rosenstein, 1969) would suggest that deaf individuals also have difficulty generating rich semantic representations of words. In summary, the findings of the present study indicate that deaf adolescent/adult readers are capable of instantiating particular meanings of general terms but that they do not do so spontaneously. A concomitant finding was that deaf readers are better able to recall sentences in which all of the relationships are stated explicitly. Two possible, but not mutually exclusive, explanations were suggested. The obtained results may be due to the generation of impoverished semantic representations (Paris and Lindauer, 1976; Silverman and Rosenstein, 1969) or to insufficient experience and strategies in using constructive processes. Based on these findings, the instantiation process, as a spontaneous phenomenon, cannot be extended to deaf adolescent/adult readers nor can the source of this problem be isolated at present.
REFERENCES Anderson, R. C., and McGaw, B. (1973). On the representation ef the meanings of general terms. J. Exp. Psychol. 101:301-306. Anderson, R. C., and Ortony, A. (1975). On putting applies into bottles: A problem of polysemy. Cognitive Psychol. 7: 167-181. Anderson, R. C., Pichert, J. W., Goetz, E. T., Schallert, D. L., Stevens, K. V., and Trollip, S. R. (1976). Instantiation of general terms. J. Verbal Learn. Verbal Behav.
15:667-679.
Anderson, R. C., Stevens, K. C., Shifrin, Z., and Osborn, J. H. (1978). Instantiation of word meanings in children. J. Reading Behav. 10:149-157. Barclay, J. R., Bransford, J. D., Franks, J. J., McCarrell, N. S., and Nitsch, K. (1974). Comprehension and semantic flexibility. J. Verbal Learn. VerbalBehav. 13:471-481.
Bilsky, L. H., Walker, N., and Sakales, S. R. (1983). Comprehension and recall of sentences by retarded and nonretarded individuals. Am. J. Ment. Defic. 87:558-565.
Cohen, S. R. (1967). Predictability of deaf and hearing story paraphrases. J. Verbal Learn.
Verbal Behav.
6:916-921.
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Conrad, R. (1979). The Deaf School Child. London:
Harper & Row.
Dreher, ‘M. 3. (1981). The generalizability dren. Reading Res. Q. 17:28-43.
of the instantiation
hypothesis
et ai.
to chil-
S. (1972). Academic Achievement Test Results of a National Testing Program for Hearing Impaired Students, United States, Spring, 1971. Wash-
DiFrancesca,
ington, D.C.: GaIlaudet College, Office of Demographic
Studies.
Fremer, J. J., and MacGinitie, W. H. (1969). The content of controlled continuous word associations. In J. Rosenstein and W. H. MacGinitie (eds.), Verbal Behavior of the Deaf Child. New York: Teachers College Press. Garnham, Gentner,
A. (1979). Instantiation D. (1981). Integrating
of verbs. J. Exp. Psychol. 31:207-214. verb meanings into context.
Discourse
Process.
41349-37s.
Hammermeister, 116:25-28.
F. (1971). Reading achievement
in deaf adults. Am. Ann. Deaf
Hoemann, H. W., Andrews, C. E., and DeRosa, D. V. (1974). Categorical encoding in short-term memory by deaf and hearing children. J. Speech Hear. Res. 17:426-431.
Kintsch,
W. (1975). Memory for prose. In C. N. Cofer (ed.), The Structure of San Francisco: Freeman.
Human Memory.
Liben, L. S. (1979). Free recall by deaf and hearing children: Semantic clustering and recall in trained and untrained groups. J. Exp. Child Psychol. 27: 105-l 19. MacGinitie, W. H. (1969). Flexibility in dealing with alternative meanings of words. In J. Rosenstein and W. H. MacGinitie (eds.), Verbal Behavior of the Deuf Child. New York: Teachers College Press. Marshall,
W. (1970). Contextual
constraints
on deaf and hearing children.
Am.
Ann. Deaf 115:682-689.
McGettigan, J. F., and Rosenstein, J. (1969). The influence of associative strength in identification of word meanings. In J. Rosenstein and W. H. MacGinitie (eds.) Verbal Behavior of the Deaf Child. New York: Teachers College Press. Moores, D. (1967). Applications of “cloze” procedures to the assessment of psycholinguistic abilities of the deaf. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois. Paris, S. G., and Carter, A. Y. (1973). Semantic and constructive sentence memory in children. Dev. Psycho/. 9:109-113.
aspects
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Paris, S. G., and Lindauer, B. K. (1976). The role of inference in children’s comprehension and memory for sentences. Cognitive Psychol. 8:217-227. Paris, S. G., and Lindauer, B. K. (1977). Constructive aspects of children’s comprehension and memory. In R. V. Kail, Jr. and J. W. Hagen (eds.) Perspectives on the Development of Memory and Cognition (pp. 35-60). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Restino, L. C. R. (1969). Word associations of deaf and hearing children. In J. Rosenstein and W. H. MacGinitie (eds.), Verbal Behavior of the Deaf Child. New York: Teachers College Press.
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TERMS
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Silverman, T., and Rosenstein, J. (1969). The contribution of associative processes to written meaning. In J. Rosenstein and W. H. MacGinitie (eds.) Verbal Behavior of the Deaf Child. New York: Teachers College Press. Smith, E. E., Shoben, E. J., and Rips, L. J. (1975). Structure and process in semantic memory: A featural model for semantic decisions. Psychol. Rev. 4:6173. Taylor, S. E., Frackenpohl, H., and Pettee, J. L. (1960). Grade level norms for the components of the fundamental reading skills, Research Information Bulletin, No. 3. Huntington, NY: Educational Developmental Laboratories, Inc., a division of McGraw-Hill. Trybus, R., and Karchmer, M. (1977). School achievement scores of hearing impaired children: National data on achievement status and growth patterns. Am. Ann. Deaf. 122162-69. Tweney, R. D., Hoemann, H. W., and Andrews, C. E. (1975). Semantic nization in deaf and hearing subjects. J. Psycholinguistic Res. 4:61-73.
orga-
Wilson, K. (1979). Inference and language processing in hearing and deaf children. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Boston University.
THE INSTANTIATION OF GENERAL TERMS BY DEAF ADOLESCENTS/ADULTS BARBARA
K. STRASSMAN
Trenton State College
ROBERT E. KRETSCHMER
and LINDA H. BILSKY
Columbia University
Two studies were conducted using severely and profoundly deaf high school students to determine their ability to instantiate particular exemplars of general nouns and to use those instantiations as retrieval cues. The results indicated that (1) the deaf adolescents/adults could instantiate when asked to do so but did not do so spontaneously; (2) sentence recall was best when the retrieval cue matched the word used in the original sentence; and (3) recall of sentences in which all information was explicit was better than of sentences in which some information had to be inferred. Impoverished semantic representations, difficulty in integrating semantic representations, and insufficient strategy use were suggested as possible alternative and competing explanations for the obtained results.
INTRODUCTION The instantiation hypothesis, a suggested explanation of one inferential comprehension process, was proposed by Anderson, Pichert, Goetz, Schallert, Stevens, and Trollip (1976). It is based on a schematic representation of semantic memory in which words are represented by a set of characteristic features. Not all of these features, however, are necessarily common to each sense of a given word (Smith, Shoben, and Rips, 1974). Thus, the hypothesis maintains that words have a “family” of potential meanings. Instantiation is the process by which a particular meaning appropriate to a given context is accessed or inferred. The instantiation process requires the constructive use of categorical relationships. This hypothesis has been tested by Anderson et al. (1976) in a cued sentence-recall task with adults. Sentence pairs, using identical subject noun phrases, were designed to encourage diverse interpretations of the subject noun. The context of one sentence, “The boy earned a merit badge. “, was structured to encourage the instantiation of a particular noun Address correspondence to Robert E. Kretschmer, Ph.D., Teachers College, Columbia University, Department of Special Education, Box 223, New York, NY 10027. 8 1987by Elsevier Science Publishing Co., Inc. 52 Vanderbilt Ave., New York, NY 10017
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2
B. K. STRASSMAN et al.
(e.g., the scout). The context of the other sentence, “The boy saw the policeman’s badge.” was structured to encourage a more generic interpretation of the general category noun phrase included in both sentences (e.g., the boy). Anderson et al. found that for college students a particular cue (the expected instantiation) produced better recall of a target sentence than did the general term actually used in the sentence. For example, “scout” was a better retrieval cue than “boy” for the sentence, “The boy earned a merit badge.” The context of the control sentence, “The boy saw the policeman’s badge.” did not encourage the instantiation of a specific meaning of the word “boy.” Consequently, the general cue “boy” was a more effective retrieval cue for the control sentence. Using sentences as the contextual frame, the findings of Anderson et al. (1976) provided support for the instantiation hypothesis with nouns. Garnham (1979) extended the generality of this finding, reporting that college students also instantiate the meanings of verbs within a sentence. Gentner (1981) demonstrated the instantiation of verb meanings across sentences in a passage. These studies, as well as others, support the notion that comprehension and memory processes in adults are constructive and inferential (Anderson and McGaw, 1973; Anderson and Ortony, 1975; Barclay, Bransford, Franks, McCarrell, and Nitsch, 1974). Recent studies with youngsters have examined children’s constructive and inferential processes in light of the instantiation hypothesis. Anderson, Stevens, Shifrin, and Osbom (1978) reported that first and fourth graders can select a picture of the expected instantiation of a sentence’s object noun. In a cued sentence-recall task Dreher (1981) observed that fifth, sixth, and eighth graders used general and particular cues equally effectively as retrieval aids for target sentences. Bilsky, Walker, and Sakales (1983), in a study involving fourth graders and mildly retarded adolescents, made an observation similar to that of Dreher’s. While, in children, particular cues are not superior to general cues as recall aids, their equal effectiveness suggests that some constructive processing is occurring (Bilsky et al., 1983). The emerging picture seems to be that with age, children develop the constructive and inferential comprehension and memory processes used by adults (Paris and Lindauer, 1976, 1977; Paris and Carter, 1973; Bilsky et al., 1983). The purpose of the present research was to examine the constructive and inferential processes of deaf adolescents/adults in light of the instantiation hypothesis. High school students were selected for this research for several reasons. First, based on studies conducted by Hammermeister (1971), by DiFrancesca (1972), and by Trybus and Karchmer (1977) the present researchers felt that the high school age group would adequately reflect the abilities of typical adult deaf readers. Hammermeister (1971) compared Stanford Reading Achievement test scores obtained during the final high school year of 60 students with scores obtained when the same
INSTANTIATION
OF GENERAL TERMS
3
test was readministered 7 to 13 years later. While the results indicated significant gains on the test of Word Meaning, these gains were of less than one grade level for students who had not gone on to at least one year of college. For the 10 students who had attended college, a slightly larger gain was found. No significant gains were found for either group on the test of Paragraph Meaning. DiFrancesca (1972) examined test scores for approximately 17,000 deaf students (ranging in age from 6 to 21 years) on the Stanford Achievement Test. The highest mean grade equivalent score on the Paragraph Meaning subtest was 4.3 at age 19, and the average rate of growth was 0.2 grade levels per year of schooling. More recently, Trybus and Karchmer (1977) found similar results based on a stratified random sample of almost 7,000 deaf students. In addition, they found that only 10% of the best reading group could read at or above the 8th grade level. The combined results of these studies suggest that high school hearing-impaired students are reading at or just slightly below the level at which typical deaf adults read. An additional reason for using high, school students was that an examination of school records enabled the researchers to ensure that all participants met predetermined criteria (normal intelligence, reading at or above third grade level, no secondary handicap, hearing parents, prelingually deaf, severe to profound hearing loss). Two questions were investigated: (1) When directed to do so, would deaf adolescent/adult readers instantiate general terms in sentences they read? and (2) In sentences they read, would deaf adolescent/adult readers spontaneously instantiate particular instances of general terms? If both questions were answered affirmatively, then the applicability of the instantiation hypothesis, which has been supported with mature hearing readers, may be extended to deaf adolescent/adult readers. Findings from three areas of research suggest that this may not be the case. First, it has been well documented that the reading achievement levels of deaf individuals are significantly below achievement levels of comparable hearing groups (DiFrancesca, 1972; Trybus and Karchmer, 1977; Conrad, 1979). As measured by the Stanford Achievement Test, the national median reading score for 20-year-old deaf students has been noted to be at a grade equivalent of 4.5 (Trybus and Karchmer, 1977). Owing to the nature of low-level reading materials, it is possible that the average adolescent/adult deaf reader may not have had experience with the variety of demands made by higher-level reading materials. Consequently, it is possible that the average adolescent/adult deaf reader may not be practiced in employing constructive and inferential processes when reading. Secondly, several studies comparing the hearing-impaired child and the normally hearing child’s ability to generate word meanings and associations of isolated words have found that hearing impaired individuals (1)
4
B. K. STRASSMAN
et al.
are less accurate in their definitions of words (Silverman and Rosenstein, 1969), (2) tend to use associations rather than critical semantic features to define words (Silverman and Rosenstein, 1969), (3) have great difficulty in differentiating synonymous relationships from other associative relationships (McGettigan and Rosenstein, 1969; MacGinitie, 1969), and (4) show little growth in their ability to generate specific instances of a category (Restaino, 1969; Fremer and MacGinitie, 1969). Instantiation is predicated on semantic representations which have well-defined sets of word definitions, clearly articulated concepts, and a variety of specific connections between and among words. These studies, in contrast to those investigating the verbal categorical and clustering abilities of deaf youngsters (Hoemann, Andrews, and DeRosa, 1974; Tweney, Hoemann, and Andrews, 1975; Liben, 1979), would seem to suggest that hearing impaired individuals do not have a sufficiently rich or defined semantic base from which to construct or infer word meanings spontaneously. Thirdly, in the completion of cloze passages, hearing impaired youngsters seem to gain only minimal clues from context (Cohen, 1967; Moores, 1967; Marshall, 1970). Instantiation, like the completion of a cloze passage, is dependent upon use of context. EXPERIMENT
1
Method Subjects. Twenty-two deaf subjects were drawn from a Total Communication high school program for the deaf housed in a New Jersey public school. The ages of the subjects ranged from 13-4 to 20-2, with a mean age of 17-6 and a standard deviation (S.D.) of l-9 years. According to the school records, all of the subjects were of average intelligence. For eighteen of the subjects, performance scores on the WAIS or WISC ranged from 86 to 121 with a mean of 103.1 and a S.D. of 12.2. No scores were available for three of the subjects. (Their placement in the regular school program indicated that they were of normal intelligence.) Reading comprehension grade-equivalent scores were based on a recent administration of the Stanford Achievement Test. Reading comprehension scores ranged from 3.0 to 7.4 with a mean reading level of 5.2 and a S.D. of 1.1. All of the subjects were prelingually deaf and had no diagnosed secondary handicap. They were all classified as severely to profoundly deaf with a hearing loss of 85 dB (ANSI) or above in the better ear. Eight boys and fourteen girls participated.
Design. The purpose of this experiment was twofold: (1) to determine if deaf readers could instantiate when directed to do so and, (2) to select appropriate stimuli for Experiment 2. Response frequencies were therefore tabulated.
INSTANTIATION
OF GENERAL TERMS
5
Materials. Thirty-six pairs of sentences were constructed such that each pair contained a target sentence and a control sentence. Twentyseven of the pairs were obtained from Dreher (198 1) and four of the pairs were obtained from Bilsky et al. (1983). Target sentences were intended to elicit one particular example of the noun phrase, whereas control sentences were written simply to connote the generic instance of the noun phrase. For example, the target sentence “The woman helped the children with their math work.” was paired with a control sentence containing the identical subject noun phrase and identical last word, “The woman rode the bus to get to work.” For this example, it was intended that the target sentence would elicit the instantiated meaning of “teacher” for the phrase “the woman” while the control sentence would not lead to any one particular example of the subject noun phrase. In addition, for each pair of sentences a question about the subject noun phras: contained in the pair was generated. For the above pair of sentences the related question was “What woman does this sentence make you think of?“. Eighteen questions, one per pair of sentences, were developed. Procedure. The sentence pairs were split and randomly assigned to two lists of 36 sentences each. The lists were counterbalanced so that half of the sentences on each list were control sentences and half target. Each list of sentences was presented in a booklet, with one sentence, and its related question, per page. Subjects were randomly assigned to one of the two lists and were tested in one group. They were instructed to write their answer in the space next to the question. Three examples were done as a group to affirm that the students understood the task. In discussing the examples the examiner highlighted the categorical relationship between student responses and the general noun phrase of the stimulus. Responses of a different category were presented by the examiner to demonstrate that they were incorrect. While the youngsters were instructed to give one answer to each question, the examiner emphasized that a question might have several correct responses, as long as each was of the same category as the general noun phrase. The youngsters worked through the booklets at their own pace.
Results and Discussion The participants’ responses to questions regarding the subject noun phrases of the test stimuli were tabulated. Of particular interest was the number of times the expected instantiation was given for either type of sentence and the number of times the subjects did not give a response. Response frequencies are given in Table 1. As indicated by the number of times the subjects gave the expected instantiation for the target sentences (70.16%), the present study verified
6 Table 1. Response Experiment 1
B. K. STRASSMAN Frequencies
Expected instantiation Other responses No response Out of category
(in Percent)
by Type of Sentence
et al.
for
Target
Control
70.16 22.51 2.88 4.45 100%
17.83 65.89 4.13 12.15 100%
that when directed to do so, the participants could use sentential context as an aid in inferring particular meanings of general terms. The low number of no responses (4.13% for control sentences and 2.88% for target sentences) combined with the high rate of instantiation further indicated that the youngsters were familiar with the vocabulary being used, that they knew the categorical relationships required by the task and that they could make the required associations. Overall, the youngsters gave relatively few responses that were uninterpretable or out of category (12.15% for control sentences and 4.45% for target sentences).
EXPERIMENT
2
Method Subjects. Twenty-one of the subjects from Experiment 1, conducted 2 months earlier, participated in the present experiment. One subject was dropped because she experienced difficulty in completing the first experiment. There were no significant changes in the sample’s characteristics after dropping the one subject. Design. A 3 x 2 mixed factorial design was used. The first withinsubjects factor was sentence type (target versus control versus exemplar). The second within-subjects factor was cue type (particular versus general). Seven of the 21 subjects received each of the three sentence-lists and each of the three cue-lists. Sentence-lists and cue-lists were randomly assigned to each of the subjects. The dependent variable of primary interest was correct gist recall. Materials. In Experiment 1, 36 pairs of related sentences, consisting of a control and a target sentence, were used. Stimuli for Experiment 2 were chosen from these pairs. Criteria for stimulus selection for Experiment 2 were that (1) for the target version the expected instantiation was given at least 75.0% of the time, while (2) for the control version of the sentences, the expected instantiation was given no more than 8.0% of
INSTANTIATION
OF GENERAL
TERMS
7
the time. Based on these frequencies, 10 sentence pairs were selected for use in the present study. Each selected pair was then extended by adding a third sentence, thus forming sentence triples. The added sentence, called an exemplar, was formed by replacing the subject noun phrase of the target sentence with the expected instantiation. The following are examples of control, target, and exemplar sentences respectively: “The woman rode the bus to get to work.“, “The woman helped her students with their math work.“, and “The teacher helped her students with their math work.” The 10 sentence triples and related cues used in Experiment 2 are listed in Table 2.
Table 2. Sentences
and Cues Used in Experiment
2” Cues
Sentences
Particular
The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The
ship sailed across the water. ship moved underneath the water. submarine moved underneath the water. fish swam away from the swimmer. fish attacked the swimmer. shark attacked the swimmer. building was closed every Sunday. building was used every Sunday. church was used every Sunday. fruit had a sweet taste. fruit had a sour taste. lemon had a sour taste. cowboy shot the animal in the desert. cowboy rode the animal through the desert. cowboy rode the horse through the desert. woman rode the bus to get to work. woman helped the children with their math work. teacher helped the children with their math work. person watered the garden with a hose. person ran into the burning building with a hose. fireman ran into the burning building with a hose. insect crawled by the girl. insect stung the girl. bee stung the girl. man built a model airplane. man flew the airplane. pilot flew the airplane.
The The The The
following sentence triplet was not included in the statistical analyses: noise came from the other‘ side of the wall. Ring noise came from the phone on the wall. ring came from the phone on the wall.
’ Note: Sentences are listed in order: control, target, exemplar.
General
Submarine
Ship
Shark
Fish
Church
Building
Lemon
Fruit
Horse
Animal
Teacher
Woman
Fireman
Person
Bee
Insect
Man
Noise
8
B. K. STRASSMAN
et al.
Procedure. The 10 sentence triples were split and randomly assigned to one of three lists so that the members of a triple were on different lists. The lists were counterbalanced for sentence type. Each list was presented in a booklet, one sentence per page. The subjects were randomly assigned to the three sentence list conditions. Students were tested in one group. They were instructed, in Total Communication (i.e., simultaneously in verbal language and in sign language), to read and to remember the sentences because they would be asked to recall the sentences later. Students had a light on their desk. When the light flashed they were to turn the page of the booklet. The light was timed to give 12 set per sentence. The 12-see rate took into account the average sentence length and average necessary reading time for that length sentence (Taylor, Frackenpohl, and Pettee, 1960). Following the sentences, the students were engaged in a 5min interpolated task consisting of math computation problems. The students were then given a cued recall test. For each sentence, the students were given two types of cues: the expected instantiation (particular cue) and the subject noun of the target and control sentences (general cue). The 20 cues were divided into two block orders such that the related particular and general cues were not in the same block. Half the cues in each block were particular cues and half general cues. There were three random orders for each block and block order was counterbalanced. The subjects were randomly assigned to a cue list order. The cues were presented in a booklet, one cue per page. Students were instructued to read the word and write the sentence of which it made them think. The students were told that they could write the same sentence more than once. The youngsters worked at their own pace. Scoring. One triplet, and its two related cues, were dropped from the study in order to allow each subject to be scored for responding to an equal number of sentences of each sentence type. The subjects were thus scored on 18 responses to 9 sentences, with 3 cues representing each sentence type x cue type combination. A response was given credit if it maintained the gist meaning of the original sentence. Except for the initial noun phrase, synonyms, close synonyms, and hyponyms for all words in the sentence were accepted. For example, if a student saw the sentence “The submarine moved underneath the water.” and wrote “The submarine rode underneath the water.” the response was marked as correct. Provided the gist meaning was maintained, sentences missing words were also marked as correct. “The insect crawled the girl.” was therefore accepted for “The insect crawled near the girl.” Because two of the general cues were similar in category (“man” and “person”), responses that interchanged the general
INSTANTIATION
OF GENERAL
TERMS
or particular cues for those sentences were also given credit. Responses that consisted of only a phrase were not given credit. Independent ratings of the data were completed by two raters. Interrater reliability was quite high (r = 0.98). Disagreement was negotiated by the raters in order to obtain a single set of scores to be used in the analyses. Results and Discussion Overall, the participants in the present study demonstrated a poor rate of recall: 27.22% of the cues were responded to correctly, 10.31% of cues were responded to incorrectly, 29.62% of the cues received no response, and 32.3% of the cues received an invented response. Of the correct responses almost half (43.80%) were for exemplar sentences. The gist recall scores were subjected to a 2 (cue) x 3 (sentence) factorial analysis of variance with repeated measures on both factors. This analysis indicated a significant main effect for sentence type (F = 4.04, 2/40 df, p < 0.05)and a significant cue by sentence type interaction (F = 28.78, 2/40 df, p < 0.01). The percent of correct gist recall within conditions is shown in Table 3. Tukey post hoc comparisons for pairwise differences among sentence type means showed that exemplar sentences were better recalled than either control or target sentences. There was no difference in recall between control and target sentences. In interpreting this result it is necessary to keep in mind that the sentences each had 2 or 3 propositions and were of approximately equal length. For these reasons, each sentence should have had the same chance of being recalled (Kintsch, 1975). Yet, the subjects showed an advantage in remembering sentences in which relationships are stated explicitly (exemplar sentences) over sentences in which the relationships are implicit (target and control sentences). The present findings are similar to those reported by Paris and Lindauer (1976) for young children. Paris and Lindauer found that young children often failed to construct and remember inferred relationships that they were capable of understanding. However, when the youngsters in their
Table 3. Percent of Correct Gist Recall Responses Cue Type Conditions for Experiment 2
within Sentence
Type x
Sentence type Cue type
Control
Target
Exemplar
Particular General
11.11 38.09
6.34 38.09
63.49 9.52
10
B. K. STRASSMAN
et al.
study were forced to generate the inferential relationships, they were able to utilize that information to facilitate recall. In the present study, the subjects also failed to spontaneously construct and remember inferential relationships for which they demonstrated understanding in Experiment 1. When however, those relationships were generated for the subjects (as in exemplar sentences), they were able to utilize that information to facilitate recall. The cue type by sentence type interaction was explicated by using tests for simple effects. These tests indicated a significant difference between particular and general cues for each type of sentence: general cues were better retrieval aids for control and target sentences (p < 0.0.5>, while particular cues were better for exemplar sentences (p < 0.01). This finding suggests that hearing impaired readers do not generally instantiate spontaneously. If instantiation had occurred, then as retrieval aids for target sentences, particular cues should have been at least as effective as general cues (Anderson et al., 1976; Dreher, 1981; Bilsky et al., 1983). Yet the findings of the present study seem to indicate that the subjects did not spontaneously construct and remember the inferred relationships of which previously (in Experiment 1) they had demonstrated understanding. Rather, the present results show that the most effective retrieval cue was that which corresponded to the phrase actually read. There are at least two possible explanations for the present results. First, it may be that owing to their overall low reading level (mean = 5.2) the subjects are used to verbatim recall comprehension activities. The large percentage of no responses might further indicate that the subjects perceive recall as an explicit verbatim task. At low reading levels comprehension tasks frequently demand only factual recall (Wilson, 1979). The subjects, owing to insufticient experience, may not yet have developed strategies for inferring implicit information from text. Hence, they may be overly relying on word-by-word strategies (bottom-up processes) at the expense of top-down or semantic strategies. Alternatively, it is possible that while the subjects were able to generate semantic representations of the individual stimulus words, the strength of the associations among and between those individual representations was insufficient to be spontaneously productive. This would limit the ability to use context as an aid in comprehension (Cohen, 1967; Moores, 1967; Marshall, 1970). Thus, in Experiment 1 the subjects could make the required associations; however, the task directed them as to which association had to be made. Failure to independently make these connections in Experiment 2 might therefore indicate weak or ill-defined associations (Silverman and Rosenstein, 1969; McGettigan and Rosenstein, 1969; Fremer and MacGinitie, 1969). The advantage shown in remembering exemplar sentences over target and control sentences supports this possibility.
INSTANTIATION OF GENERAL TERMS
11
Gentner (1981) has suggested a three-stage semantic integration model that offers a framework for these possible explanations and for future study. At the first stage, the meanings of individual units are individually analyzed during comprehension into structural representations of meaning. During the second stage incoming propositions are compared for overlap of componential structure. Then, at the third stage, overlapping structures are combined into a discourse network according to their degree of overlap. The present findings suggest that stages 2 and 3 are problematic for deafadolescent/adult readers. While stage 1 was not addressed in this study, evidence from other studies (Silverman and Rosenstein, 1969) would suggest that deaf individuals also have difficulty generating rich semantic representations of words. In summary, the findings of the present study indicate that deaf adolescent/adult readers are capable of instantiating particular meanings of general terms but that they do not do so spontaneously. A concomitant finding was that deaf readers are better able to recall sentences in which all of the relationships are stated explicitly. Two possible, but not mutually exclusive, explanations were suggested. The obtained results may be due to the generation of impoverished semantic representations (Paris and Lindauer, 1976; Silverman and Rosenstein, 1969) or to insufficient experience and strategies in using constructive processes. Based on these findings, the instantiation process, as a spontaneous phenomenon, cannot be extended to deaf adolescent/adult readers nor can the source of this problem be isolated at present.
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Cohen, S. R. (1967). Predictability of deaf and hearing story paraphrases. J. Verbal Learn.
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Kintsch,
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Liben, L. S. (1979). Free recall by deaf and hearing children: Semantic clustering and recall in trained and untrained groups. J. Exp. Child Psychol. 27: 105-l 19. MacGinitie, W. H. (1969). Flexibility in dealing with alternative meanings of words. In J. Rosenstein and W. H. MacGinitie (eds.), Verbal Behavior of the Deuf Child. New York: Teachers College Press. Marshall,
W. (1970). Contextual
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McGettigan, J. F., and Rosenstein, J. (1969). The influence of associative strength in identification of word meanings. In J. Rosenstein and W. H. MacGinitie (eds.) Verbal Behavior of the Deaf Child. New York: Teachers College Press. Moores, D. (1967). Applications of “cloze” procedures to the assessment of psycholinguistic abilities of the deaf. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois. Paris, S. G., and Carter, A. Y. (1973). Semantic and constructive sentence memory in children. Dev. Psycho/. 9:109-113.
aspects
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Paris, S. G., and Lindauer, B. K. (1976). The role of inference in children’s comprehension and memory for sentences. Cognitive Psychol. 8:217-227. Paris, S. G., and Lindauer, B. K. (1977). Constructive aspects of children’s comprehension and memory. In R. V. Kail, Jr. and J. W. Hagen (eds.) Perspectives on the Development of Memory and Cognition (pp. 35-60). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Restino, L. C. R. (1969). Word associations of deaf and hearing children. In J. Rosenstein and W. H. MacGinitie (eds.), Verbal Behavior of the Deaf Child. New York: Teachers College Press.
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Silverman, T., and Rosenstein, J. (1969). The contribution of associative processes to written meaning. In J. Rosenstein and W. H. MacGinitie (eds.) Verbal Behavior of the Deaf Child. New York: Teachers College Press. Smith, E. E., Shoben, E. J., and Rips, L. J. (1975). Structure and process in semantic memory: A featural model for semantic decisions. Psychol. Rev. 4:6173. Taylor, S. E., Frackenpohl, H., and Pettee, J. L. (1960). Grade level norms for the components of the fundamental reading skills, Research Information Bulletin, No. 3. Huntington, NY: Educational Developmental Laboratories, Inc., a division of McGraw-Hill. Trybus, R., and Karchmer, M. (1977). School achievement scores of hearing impaired children: National data on achievement status and growth patterns. Am. Ann. Deaf. 122162-69. Tweney, R. D., Hoemann, H. W., and Andrews, C. E. (1975). Semantic nization in deaf and hearing subjects. J. Psycholinguistic Res. 4:61-73.
orga-
Wilson, K. (1979). Inference and language processing in hearing and deaf children. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Boston University.