Semantic and surface codes in the memory of deaf children

COGNITIVE

PSYCHOLOGY

9, 475-493 (1977)

Semantic

and Surface

Memory

Codes in the

of Deaf Children

BARBARA FRUMKIN Yeshiva

AND

MOSHE ANISFELD

Univei-sify

In three experiments, deaf children in the age range of 6 years, 10 months to 15 years, 5 months were presented with continuous lists of items, and for each item they had to indicate whether it had appeared before on the list. Later items were related to preceding items either in surface form or in meaning or were unrelated. False-recognition errors (i.e., “yes” responses to new items) served as an index of memorial coding. In one experiment, the items presented to the subjects were printed words. The results of this experiment showed a falserecognition effect (i.e., more errors to related words than to unrelated words) for both semantically related words and orthographically similar words. In the other two experiments, the subjects viewed a series of manual signs on videotape. In these experiments, there was a false-recognition effect for signs related semantically and for signs related cherologicahy (i.e., similar in terms of their manual production). These results establish orthography and cherology as effective memorial codes for deaf children. The finding of a consistently strong semantic effect for young deaf children stands in contrast to findings of weak semantic effects in false-recognition studies with young hearing children. The ascendancy of semantic codes for deaf children was attributed to the absence of competition from the speech code which dominates the linguistic memory of hearing children.

The research described in this paper addresses the question of what codes deaf children use in the storing of linguistic items. The role of three codes is examined: orthography, meaning, and manual signs. For hearing individuals, the speech code occupies a preeminent role, being used in short-term memory even when the material (words and letters) is presented visually (see Crowder, 1972, and references therein).

This research was supported by a grant from NINCDS, ROI NS 12415. We are grateful to Dr. Alan Lerman of the Lexington School for the Deaf in New York and to Dr. James MacDougall of the MacKay School for Deaf and Crippled Children in Montreal for their assistance in the conduct of our experiments in their schools. Very special thanks are due to Sister Rosemary Lesser, Sister Kathy Costello, and Sister Francis Solano of St. Francis de Sales School for the Deaf in New York for their continued cooperation and assistance throughout the period of experimentation. We also wish to thank all the teachers of our subjects at St. Francis who so graciously arranged their schedules to accomodate us. Requests for reprints should be addressed to Moshe Anisfeld, Department of Psychology, Yeshiva University, 55 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10003. 475 Copyright

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476

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The attractiveness of the phonetic code in the memory of verbal material over the orthographic code is especially impressive in view of the dominance of the visual sense and the pervasiveness of visual imagery (see Paivio, 1971, especially pp. 12,478-479). The exceptional role of the phonetic dimension in verbal memory seems to derive from its role in the language system. Unlike writing, which is external to language, speech is an organic part of it. In fact, it appears that language was designed to be manifested through speech. Evidence in support of this position can be adduced from a variety of sources. First, on the level of formal linguistic analysis, the operations involved in the functioning of the sound system appear to be closely related to those of other components of language, in particular syntax (see Chomsky & Halle, 1968). Secondly, perceptual research supports the linguistic analysis by showing that speech recognition is mediated by complex rules resembling the rules of syntax (see Liberman, 1970). Thirdly, it has been found that infants as young as 1 month are more sensitive to speech differences that are functional in language than to differences of equal magnitude that are not functional, suggesting that the brain is preprogrammed for speech analysis (Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, & Vigorito, 1971). Relatedly, studies indicate that all speech, even in distorted form, is processed in the left cerebral hemisphere, the hemisphere specialized for language (see Kimura & Folb, 1968). In contrast, with respect to letters, only those presented in familiar typefaces were found to be processed in the left hemisphere (Bryden & Allard, 1976). The foregoing points lead to the conclusion that speech is an integral part of language. On the basis of this conclusion, we are proposing that the phonetic code owes its unique status in memory to its intrinsic association with language. Given their limited access to speech, the question naturally arises as to what codes the deaf use in memory. Conrad (1972a, b, 1973) investigated this question extensively with respect to the short-term memory of letters. The conclusion that emerges from this work is that deaf children and adults, especially those having poorly developed speech skills, do use the visual properties of letters in coding them for immediate recall. Also concerned with the memory of visually presented letters, Locke and Locke (1971) studied the role of the dactylic dimension, i.e., the role of the finger configurations used to spell the letters of the alphabet manually. They gave subjects the task of learning pairs of letters similar dactylically, visually, and phonetically. They found that for severely deaf subjects dactylic similarities were most effective in facilitating learning and were responsible for the largest number of intrusion errors. Letter-shape similarities were less helpful in recall, although they too produced intrusion errors, whereas phonetic similarities (via letter names) exerted the least influence in the performance of the subjects. Several recent studies investigated the role of manual codes in the domain of verbal concepts (Bellugi, Klima, & Siple, 1975; Conlin &

MEMORY

CODES

IN DEAF

CHILDREN

477

Paivio, 1975; Moulton & Beasley, 1975). Bellugi et al. (1975) examined the influence of the formational aspects of American Sign Language (ASL) on the immediate recall of eight deaf students. The subjects were shown series of signs on videotape ranging in length from three to seven, at the rate of one sign per second. Their task was to write the English equivalents of the signs immediately after presentation of each series. A group of hearing students received the same task except that they were given, on audiotape, the English-word glosses of the signs. Analyzing the intrusion errors, Bellugi et al. (1975) found that while the intrusions of the hearing subjects tended to be similar to the original words in terms of sound composition, the intrusions of the deaf subjects tended to be similar to the original signs in terms of their manual formation. The semantic similarity between the intrusion errors and the originals was somewhat greater for the deaf subjects than for the hearing subjects. But Bellugi et al. (1975) attribute this to the overlap between semantic similarity and formational similarity. The signs in ASL are characterized by four simultaneously occurring parameters: configuration of hand(s), place of production, movement, and orientation. Bellugi and Klima (1975) report that two-thirds of the intrusion errors in the experiment described and in a previous experiment differed from the corresponding originals in only one of these four parameters, suggesting that the formational properties of the signs were retained in memory. From these findings they drew the conclusion that with respect to memorial coding signs function for the deaf like speech for the hearing. This generalization may, however, be premature. The critical evidence for speech as an attractive code arises from studies showing that items presented in a nonspeech medium are recoded into speech. In the present case, no recoding was necessary for the items to be stored as signs because they were presented in this form. Another way a code may prove its prowess is by holding information for relatively long periods. In the Bellugi et al. (1975) experiment the interval between item presentation and recall ranged from a minimum of 0 set to a maximum of 13 sec. In contrast, there is evidence that phonetic information can be retained for at least l-5 min (Anisfeld, 1969) and, perhaps, even longer (Nelson & Davis, 1972). Thus, although the Bellugi et al. (1975) study has shown that there is some similarity between the functioning of manual signs and the functioning of speech in memory, it has not proven that the influence of signs in memory is comparable to that of speech. Conlin and Paivio (1975) studied the influence of sign coding on material presented in word form. In that study deaf and hearing students learned a list of 20 pairs, presented at the rate of 4 set/pair. They were given three trials, and after each trial had to recall the responses upon presentation of the stimuli. The time allotted per item in the test phase was 8 sec. The experiment included high imagery and low imagery words and high signa-

478

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bility and low signability words. These subcategories of words were equated on printed frequency of occurrence. The high signability words were those that readily suggested to deaf judges sign equivalents, while the low signability words were those that presented difficulties in capturing their meanings in sign form. In two experiments, they found a main effect for signability, i.e., more high signability words were learned than low signability words. They also found an interaction of the signability factor with the deaf-hearing factor, indicating that the advantage of signability was greater for the deaf than for the hearing. The influence of signability on the memory of words over relatively long intervals found in this experiment would constitute strong evidence for the coding facility of signs, if it could be assumed that the high signability and low signability words did not differ in any other respects. But this assumption does not seem justified, because the development of signs can hardly be considered a fortuitous matter. Since the list of words used is not given, one can only guess at the features that may have distinguished the high and low signability words. In general, uniform signs are likely to develop more readily for linguistic concepts which have greater communicative utility. Certainly, signability should have had no relevance for the hearing subjects, and yet more high signability words were learned by them than low signability words, on the first trial. Moulton and Beasley (1975) also used a paired-associate learning task in testing the influence of knowledge of signs on the performance of adult deaf subjects. Their findings suggest that both semantic similarity and formational sign similarity between the two words in a pair facilitated learning. But the similarities were so transparent that they may have led the subjects to adopt learning strategies which they do not normally use in memorial coding. In summary, the studies reviewed indicate that the formational aspects of signs play a role in the memory of the deaf. But the full extent of this role remains to be determined. It has also been found that the deaf code the visual properties of letters in memory, but this variable has not been investigated in the case of words. The research to be reported here investigated the influence of three factors in the memory of deaf children, namely, orthographic properties of words, semantic aspects of words and signs, and formational characteristics of signs. The generic termformational, preferred by Bellugi et al. (1975), will be used here interchangeably with the specific term cherologicd of Stokoe, Casterline, and Croneberg (1965), which is to manual signs what phonological is to speech. The present research grew out of previous work in our laboratory on linguistic memory in hearing children (Felzen & Anisfeld, 1970). That research employed a false-recognition technique in which children at two age levels (mean ages 8 years, 6 months; 11 years, 5 months) heard a continuous list of words at the rate of 5.5 set/word. The list was so struc-

MEMORY

CODES IN DEAF CHILDREN

479

tured that some later words were related to preceding words either semantically (as synonyms or antonyms) or phonetically (as rhymes). The related words were placed 9-14 positions after their antecedents. As each word was heard, the subjects had to indicate whether or not it appeared before on the list. The older children gave relatively more affirmative (false recognition) responses to words which were semantically related to previous words than to those which were phonetically related, while the results for the younger children were reversed. An interaction between age and the semantic-phonetic factor was also found by Bach and Underwood (1970) using a different recognition procedure. False recognition is assumed to be due to the implicit activation of the related items when the original items are presented. This activation has been conceptualized in terms of a commonality-of-features model (e.g., Anisfeld & Knapp, 1968; Macleod & Nelson, 1976), but it can readily be framed in terms of a spread-of-activation model (Collins & Loftus, 1975). Whatever the model, the problem is to explain why the younger children were less influenced by semantic relations and more by phonetic relations. The words used were common ones, and it was ascertained that they were known even by the younger subjects. It is not likely that a child or adult will respond to a meaningful word without taking cognizance of its meaning (see Postman, 1975). Therefore, the finding that the 8- to 9-year-old children showed a greater tendency to confuse words that sounded alike than words that had related meanings seems to indicate that in their internal organization of words the semantic factor plays a less influential role than the phonetic factor. This suggests that just as speech dominates short-term memory, so it also dominates the memory of young children over longer time periods, perhaps, for the same reason, i.e., its status in the language system. In view of the dominance of speech in the memory of hearing children, the question arises what code will fill the vacuum for deaf children. Will the place of speech be taken by other surface codes, i.e., orthographic characteristics of words and cherological aspects of signs? Or will the freedom from the dominance of speech allow the fuller participation of semantic codes? These questions were investigated in three experiments using the basic false-recognition procedure of the Felzen and Anisfeld (1970) experiment. The first experiment evaluated the effects of semantic and orthographic similarities, and the last two experiments examined the effects of semantic and cherological sign similarities. EXPERIMENT

I

Method Subjects. The study was conducted in 1972- 1973 at the Lexington School for the Deaf in New York City, which uses the oral method of teaching. The sample was comprised of 15 high school children: eight girls and seven boys (mean age, 14 years, 7 months;

480

FRUMKIN

AND ANISFELD

range, 13 years, 7 months to 15 years, 5 months), and 15 elementary school children: seven girls and eight boys (mean age, 8 years, 9 months; range, 7 years, 3 months to 10 years, 4 months). The children came primarily from middle-class homes and except for one Black child in each of the age groups, all the subjects were Caucasian. Their IQ scores, as measured by the performance scale of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), ranged from 92 to 135. All children were classified by the school as profoundly deaf. Their hearing loss in the better ear was between 82 and 110 db in the speech range frequencies. They were all day students at the school, and they were considered “normal deaf” in the sense that they had no disorders that complicated their deafness condition. Materials and procedure. In assembling words for the experiment, nine clusters were prepared. Each cluster consisted of five words: an antecedent (A) word; a word related semantically (S, as an antonym or synonym) to the A word, and a word related orthographically (0) to the A word; a control word for the semantically related word (CS); and a control word for the orthographically related word (CO). The 0 words rhymed with the A words. The A-O pairs thus exhibited both orthographic and phonetic similarity. But the phonetic factor was, of course, of limited relevance for the deaf subjects. Each control word was matched with its experimental (experimental = semantic and orthographic) mate on part of speech, syllabic length, and as to the percentage of deaf children who, in a nationwide survey, knew the words. These percentages were taken from Silverman-Dresner and Guilfoyle (1972). It was not always possible to match the experimental and control words one for one with respect to these percentages, but the totals for the S and CS categories were identical, as were the totals for the 0 and CO categories. In addition, all words were judged by the subjects’ teachers to be definitely known to no less than 90% of the children at the younger age level. The nine clusters used in the experiment can be seen in Table 1. The list was arranged in the following way. Each A word appeared twice on the list, the second appearance following the first by seven positions. Each experimental word appeared once as did its corresponding control word. One position separated each control word from its experimental mate. The control words followed the experimental words in half of the cases and preceded them in the other half. Both experimental words of a given cluster appeared after the second token of their A mate. One of the experimental words was positioned eight spaces after the A word and the other 13 spaces. Five of the S words appeared in the eight-spaces-after positions and four of the 0 words appeared in these positions. TABLE

1

THEANTECEDENT,EXPEIUMENTAL,ANDCONTROLWORDSUSED

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

IN EXPERIMENT

I

Antecedent word

Semantic relation

Semantic control

Orthographic relation

Orthographic control

boy

girl give come good hot home kitten less look

fish sleep want fast hard nose mailbox late write

toy make low sad old

clock paint far black long boot bread cloud us

take go bad cold house cat more see

hat store me

MEMORY

CODES IN DEAF CHILDREN

481

The nine clusters, including the repetitions of the A words, thus took up 54 positions. To these were added 15 filler words which were also known by at least 90% of the younger subjects. The filler words had no obvious relation to any other words on the list. Five fillers appeared three times each, six appeared twice each, and four appeared once each. The 15 fillers thus occupied 31 positions, making a total list of 85 words. Filler words appeared in positions l-3,6- 10, and 13- 16; the other fillers were scattered throughout the list to facilitate the ordering of the nine clusters as outlined above. The words were typed on transparencies in lower case and projected by means of a slide projector at the rate of one word every 3 sec. The subjects were instructed to say “new” to words that they saw for the first time on the list and “old” to words they had seen before. The instructions were given by the subjects’ teachers. A pretest practice trial was used to make sure the instructions were understood. The subjects were tested individually and the experimenter recorded the responses. The speech of the subjects was sufficiently clear to allow this procedure.

Results and Discussion Two kinds of errors were made in the experiment: “new” responses to words which had appeared before, and “old” responses to new words. The percentage of errors of both kinds for all 85 words was 11 for the younger subjects and 21 for the older subjects. The large difference between the two groups was due to a disproportionately high number of errors by three subjects in the older group, and it was not statistically significant, t(28) = 1.99, p > .05. The interest of the study focused on the pattern of “old” responses, i.e., false-recognition errors, to the S, CS, 0, and CO categories of words, for the two age groups. Table 2 summarizes the findings. It may be seen in the table that there were significant false-recognition effects for both the orthographic relations and the semantic relations, for both age groups. That is, the number of errors to the S and 0 words was significantly higher than the number of errors to the respective C words in all four cases. It is also evident from Table 2 that the semantic effect was stronger than the orthographic effect. This was confirmed by a two-way analysis of variance (grade x type of relation). The entries on which this analysis was based were the O-minus-CO and the S-minus-CS scores for each subject. The only significant effect yielded by this analysis was for the difference between the semantic relations and the orthographic relations, F(1,28) = 6.90, p < .05. There was neither a grade effect nor an interaction between grade and type of relation. The strength of the semantic factor for the older deaf subjects parallels similar findings for hearing subjects of comparable age. But the strength of the semantic effect for the younger deaf subjects runs counter to findings with younger hearing subjects, who in previous studies produced weak semantic effects. Before pursuing this point it was necessary to determine that the previous results would be replicated with the present materials and mode of presentation (visual). For this purpose, a group of young hearing children, including eight girls and eight boys (mean age,

482

FRUMKIN

AND ANISFELD TABLE

MEAN

NUMBER

OF ERRORS

TO EXPERIMENTAL

2 AND

Semantic relations Younger deaf Experimental Control f (14) Older deaf Experimental Control t (14) Young hearing Experimental Control t (1%

TO CONTROL

WORDS

IN EXPERIMENT

Orthographic

2.53 0.93 3.65*

1.47 0.60 2.81°

3.80 1.60 3.67*

1.87 1.07 2.30”

1.69 1.56 0.33

2.25 0.75 5.176

I

relations

a Significant beyond the .05 level, two-tailed correlated tests. * Significant beyond the .Ol level, two-tailed correlated tests.

8 years, 2 months) was tested in the Englewood (New Jersey) Summer School, using the same words and procedures as were used with the deaf children. The overall percentage of errors (13) for these hearing subjects was virtually the same as was obtained for the younger deaf subjects (ll), but the pattern of errors was totally different. It may be seen in Table 2 that in the case of the hearing subjects there was a highly significant false-recognition effect for the orthographic relations, but no effect at all for the semantic relations. This contrasts with the finding for the deaf subjects where the semantic effect was stronger than the orthographic effect. The difference between the hearing and deaf groups is brought out clearly in an analysis of variance which compared the performance of the younger deaf group with that of the hearing group. This analysis, as the previous one, was based on the experimental-minus-control scores. There were two factors: hearing status and type of relation. The only significant effect was an interaction between these two factors, F(1,29) = 12.94, p < .Ol. To break down this interaction, an analysis of simple main effects was carried out. It showed that of the four comparisons involved, only two were significant. The semantic effect (S-minus-CS) was stronger for the deaf than for the hearing, F(1,29) = 9.30, p < .Ol, and within the hearing group the semantic effect was weaker than the orthographic effect (O-minus-CO) F( 1,29) = 11.89, p < .Ol. Because of the large difference between the CS and CO categories, the last result seemed in need of further support. Therefore, a direct comparison was made between the S and 0 categories. To facilitate this comparison the two categories were equated on frequency, using the third-grade

MEMORY

CODES

IN DEAF

483

CHILDREN

table of Carroll, Davies, and Richman (1971). This necessitated the removal of one S-O pair from the analysis. This new analysis yielded a significant difference, t( 15) = 2.18, p < .05, in favor of the 0 category. The results discussed so far are based on an analysis by subjects. The opposing patterns of results for the deaf and hearing can also be seen in the tabulation by pairs given in Table 3. It is evident that the hearing subjects produced a clear-cut false-recognition effect for the orthographic relations and no effect for the semantic relations. In contrast, the deaf subjects produced a strong semantic effect and a weaker orthographic effect. The results for the hearing subjects replicate previous studies which revealed the dominance of the phonetic code for young hearing children. Even though, in the present case, the words were presented visually, the hearing subjects almost certainly read them vocally or subvocally, thus engaging the phonetic code in addition to the orthographic code. It is noteworthy that the deaf children also produced a significant orthographic effect, despite their limited phonetic capacity. It is likely that for them the visual similarities played a major role in producing the effect. Two of the A-O pairs (numbers 3 and 9 in Table 1) exhibited low orthographic similarity, and indeed showed no falserecognition effect for the deaf subjects. The deaf and hearing subjects thus behaved in a substantially similar manner with respect to the orthographic relations. But they differed drastically with respect to the semantic relations. Furthermore, while for the deaf subjects there was little difference between the orthographic dimension and the semantic dimension, for the hearing subjects there was a weighty difference. In fact, the hearing group produced no semantic effect while the deaf group did. The deaf subjects stand out in TABLE TABULATION

BY

Younger

s > cs

3

PAIRS OF RESULTS OF EXPERIMENT

I”

deaf

Young

Older

deaf

hearing

s < cs s = cs

8 0 1

9 0 0

3 3 3

0 > co 0 < co 0 = co

5 0 4

6 2 1

8 0 1

u S > CS designates number of pairs (out of nine) for which more errors were made to the S word than to its CS mate; S < CS, number of pairs with fewer errors to the S word than to the CS word; S = CS, number of pairs with an equal number of errors to the S word and the CS word. The designations 0 > CO, 0 < CO, and 0 = CO have corresponding meanings.

484

FRUMKIN

AND ANISFELD

terms of the force the semantic relations had for them. This conclusion is based essentially on two comparisons: between semantic relations and orthographic relations, and between deaf and hearing subjects. Each of these comparisons on its own may be open to question, but by their convergence on a common conclusion they reinforce one another. It must also be emphasized that although the deaf and hearing subjects were not carefully matched on relevant variables, they turned out to be equated on a variable which, perhaps, counts most, i.e., their overall performance on the task as reflected by the total number of false positive and false negative responses for all words used. The force of the semantic effect in young deaf children suggests that they utilized semantic codes prominently at an earlier age than hearing children. Why? Perhaps, they transferred the information more readily to the semantic level because they lacked open access to the phonetic code. While the hearing children recoded the written words into phonetic form, the deaf children recoded them into semantic form. If so, the question arises whether the semantic code will retain its status with material presented in a more natural medium for the deaf, namely, sign language. Will the sign code hold the information for deaf children the way speech does for hearing children? The following two experiments were addressed to this issue. They were also intended to determine whether the formational aspects of signs will be retained for periods longer than those previously obtained. Both experiments followed the method of Experiment I except that signs were used instead of words. EXPERIMENT

II

Method Subjects. A group of 16 younger children (mean age, 8 years, 3 months; range, 7 years, 8 months to 8 years, 7 months) and a group of 13 older children (mean age, 13 years, 7 months; range 12 years, 3 months to 14 years, 10 months) served as subjects. There were nine boys and seven girls in the younger group and nine boys and four girls in the older group. The subjects were day students at the St. Francis de Sales School for the Deaf in Brooklyn, New York. The school uses the total communication method of instruction which includes training in ASL and in English. All the subjects were congenitally or prelingually deaf. Their hearing loss in the better ear was between 75 and 110 db in the speech range frequencies. Their IQ scores ranged from 85 to 120 on the performance scale of the WISC. Two of the younger children and five of the older children were born of deaf parents or had deaf siblings and learned sign language before entering school. The other children varied in the amount of signing they knew upon entering school, but at the time of testing all had been using signs as their primary means of communication for a minimum of 3 years. Half of the children in the younger group and four in the older group were from Spanish-speaking backgrounds; the rest were from English-speaking backgrounds. Two of the younger children and two of the older children were Black. Materials and procedure. Eight clusters of five signs each were constructed. Each cluster consisted of an antecedent (A) sign, a sign related semantically to the antecedent sign (S), a sign which resembled the A sign cherologically (K), a control sign for S (CS), and a control sign for K (CK). The word glosses of these signs can be seen in Table

MEMORY

485

CODES IN DEAF CHILDREN

4. The semantic relations between the A and S items were antonymy, coordination, and synonymy. The formational similarities were based on the four parameters identified in linguistic analyses as needed to distinguish among signs, namely, hand configuration, place of articulation, movement, and orientation (see Frishberg, 1975; Stokoe, 1972). The two mates in the A-K pairs generally differed only with respect to one of these parameters. In view of the age of the subjects and the control of variables required, it was not possible to isolate the separate effects of each of these parameters, and the formational similarity dimension involved a combination of the four parameters. In this sense, it is not unlike the semantic similarity category which also involved several types of relation. Global formational similarity was based on the judgments obtained from five teachers in the school where the subjects were tested. The teachers were fluent users of ASL; one of them was deaf. They rated each A-K and A-S pair on a 5-point scale, where 1 stood for “very similar in appearance” and 5 for “as different in appearance as two signs can be.” All A-K pairs used received 1 or 2 ratings and all A-S pairs 4 or 5 ratings, by all judges. The teachers also evaluated the entire list of signs and found no two signs, other than the A-K pairs, to be closer than 4 or 5. According to the teachers, all signs were well known by the children and commonly used by them. An example of an A-K pair is wet-sofr. For both signs the hands are held in front of the body, palms up. For wet, the fingers and thumb of both hands are brought together and apart several times. For soft, the thumb and fingers of both hands are brought together, with the thumbs rubbing gently from pinky to index finger. To the 40 A, K, CK, S, and CS signs described above were added nine filler signs. The fillers were judged by the teachers to be unrelated to the other signs in the list. The list was organized as follows. The S and K items followed their A mates by eight or 13 positions, with the S items occupying half of the eight-after and half of the 13-after positions, and the K items occupying the other half. Since there are no frequency norms for signs, control items were arbitrarily assigned to specific S and K items for purposes of list placement. Half of the control signs appeared two spaces after their respective S and K mates, and half before their mates. The fillers were placed in the first five positions in the list and in spaces throughout the list left blank by the above ordering specifications. Fillers were repeated to induce a false-recognition set. Two fillers were repeated five times each, two were repeated four times each, one was repeated three times, three were repeated two times each, and one appeared once. The signs were videotaped at the rate of one sign every 5 sec. To insure familiarity with the signer, two tapes were made, one by the teacher of the younger subjects and one by the teacher of the older subjects. The teachers formed the signs in as natural a way as possible. However, they did not voice the word or use mouth movements as they TABLE THE ANTECEDENT,

1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

EXPERIMENTAL,

4

AND CONTROL

SIGNS USED IN EXPERIMENT

II

Antecedent sign

Semantic relation

Semantic control

Cherological relation

Cherological control

bread wet sit cat girl sign shoes happy

butter water stand dog boy fingerspell socks sad

hot car stop house bed stupid telephone quiet

over soft train smile tomorrow come make please

more pretty sick touch paper see dirty good

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FRUMKIN

AND ANISFELD

normally would. Instructions were given to the children by their own teachers via sign language and speech. The experimenter explained the task again, using signs and speech, immediately before each individual was tested. A list of 10 practice signs was used to insure that the subjects understood the task. The children viewed the videotape one at a time and responded to each of the signs on the screen by signing “yes” or “no” to indicate whether or not the item had appeared before or was appearing for the first time. The experimenter recorded the signed responses. Following the completion of the memory task, eight of the younger subjects were shown the videotape again, individually, and they were asked to identify each item by signing it. All subjects perfectly identified all stimuli.

Results and Discussion

The overall error rate was about the same for both age levels, being 22% for the younger group and 24% for the older group. Table 5 summarizes the distribution of false-recognition errors to the experimental and control signs. Table 6 presents a nonparametric tabulation of the results. It can be seen in Table 5 that there were significant false-recognition effects for both the semantic category and the cherological category for the younger age group and for the semantic category for the older age group. A two-way analysis of variance with age and type of relation as factors was carried out. As in the previous experiment, this analysis was based on difference scores: S-minus-CS, and K-minus-CK. The only significant effect yielded by this analysis was for type of relation, F(1,27) = 4.45, p < .05, indicating that the semantic effect was stronger than the cherological effect. This result may, however, have been due to the CS and CK categories which differed in opposite direction from the difference between the S and K categories. In fact, when the analysis of variance was done with the raw unsubtracted S and K scores no difference was obtained between these two categories. In any case, it is hard to interpret differences in magnitude of effects of different types of similarity, because one does not know whether the degree of similarity for the two dimensions was comparable. What is important in the present results is TABLE

5

MEANNUMBEROFERRORSTOEXPERIMENTALANDTOCONTROLS~GNSINEXPERIMENTII

Semantic relations

Cherological relations

Younger group Experimental Control f (1%

2.56 1.25 3.W

2.44 1.62 2.58”

Older group Experimental Control t (12)

3.93 2.31 3.83b

3.23 2.61 2.03

a Significant beyond the .05 level, two-tailed correlated tests. b Significant beyond the .Ol level, two-tailed correlated tests.

MEMORY

TABLE TABULATION

487

CODES IN DEAF CHILDREN

BY PAIRS

6

OF RESULTS

OF EXPERIMENT

II”

Younger group

Older group

MacKay group

s < cs s = cs

8 0 0

7 0 1

6 1 I

K > CK K < CK K = CK

6 1 1

5 1 2

4 1 3

s > cs

a S > CS designates number of pairs (out of eight) for which more errors were to the S sign than to its CS mate; S < CS, number of pairs with fewer errors to sign than to the CS sign; S = CS, number of pairs with an equal number of errors S sign and the CS sign. The designations K > CK, K < CK, and K = CK have sponding meanings.

made the S to the corre-

that both the semantic category and the cherological category yielded significant effects. Results similar to those described for Experiment II were obtained in a less rigorous study conducted at the MacKay Center for Deaf and Crippled Children in Montreal. Ten profoundly deaf children with a mean age of 9 years, 11 months were tested there. The method of the study was similar to that of Experiment II except that seven of the signs used were different to allow for dialect variation and the signs were presented by a teacher live, not from videotape. The results of this subsidiary study are summarized in Table 6. It can be seen that they are fully in accord with the findings of Experiment II. The results of Experiment II (and of the subsidiary study), which employed signs, are remarkably similar to those of Experiment I, which employed words. In both, surface similarity and semantic relations produced false-recognition effects. It thus appears that the role of semantic relations is not restricted to the written mode of presentation. The semantic factor retained its effectiveness in sign presentation as well. This experiment is also important in demonstrating that formational aspects of signs are retained for up to 40-65 sec. The effective role of the semantic code for deaf children 8 to 9 years old stands in contrast to its meager role for hearing children of comparable age. In the two experiments reported here the semantic effect was demonstrated for deaf children in the case of words and in the case of signs. To further extend the generalizability of the effect, a third experiment was conducted. In view of the place of imagery in memory (e.g., Conlin & Paivio, 1975), abstractness-concreteness seemed a natural dimension along which to check on the semantic effect. Consequently, the third experiment examined the false recognition of semantically

488

FRUMKIN

AND ANISFELD

and cherologically related items separately for signs having concrete meaning and signs having abstract meaning. If the semantic effect is found to be restricted to concrete signs, this would suggest that deaf children are advanced only with respect to imagery-mediated semantic coding. But if it holds up with abstract signs as well, this would indicate that they are also privileged in access to other forms of semantic coding. EXPERIMENT

III

This experiment was similar in design to the preceding experiment. Semantic and cherological relations were examined in two classes of signs. One contained signs referring to concrete concepts and the other signs referring to abstract concepts. Methods Subjects. Twenty-two children (mean age, 8 years, 5 months; range, 6 years, 10 months to 9 years, 4 months), half boys and half girls, served as subjects. The subjects were all day students in the primary section of the St. Francis de Sales School for the Deaf. The deafness and sign language characteristics of the present subjects were similar to those of the younger subjects in Experiment II. In fact, 12 of the subjects in this experiment had participated, 6 months earlier, in Experiment II. The IQ scores of the subjects ranged from 90 to 162 on the performance scale of the WISC. Eighteen of the children were from middle-class backgrounds and four from lower-class backgrounds. Three children were from Spanish-speaking homes and the rest from English-speaking homes. There were three Puerto Rican children, four Black children, and 15 White children. Maferiuls and procedure. As in Experiment II, A, S, and K signs were presented. But unlike the previous experiment, each S and K sign in the present experiment had a different A sign and a common control (C) sign. A cluster thus consisted of an A sign and its corresponding S sign, another A sign, and its corresponding K sign, and a common C sign. Five abstract and five concrete clusters were constructed. They can be seen in Table 7. As before, the A-K pairs were assessed by the teachers to be formationally similar and the rest of the items dissimilar. They also judged all the signs used to be well known by the subjects. To obtain further control of the signs used, the third-grade frequency norms of Carroll et al. (1971) were utilized. Since there are no frequency norms for signs, the frequency of occurrence of words was used to provide an approximation to the frequency of occurrence of signs. The S, K, and C signs were roughly equated on frequency within clusters, and so were the six subcategories: Abstract S, Concrete S, Abstract K, Concrete K, Abstract C, and Concrete C. Fifteen of the signs used here were also used in Experiment Il.

The distinction between Abstract and Concrete items was based on form-class membership. As can be seen in Table 7, the signs in the Concrete category were concrete nouns, while the signs in the Abstract category were mostly adjectives and verbs. The diiference in the nature of the items also carried with it a difference in the type of semantic relation involved. In the Concrete category, the relation between the A and S signs was coordination while in the Abstract category, the relation was antonymy. The Abstract category thus differs from the Concrete category not in terms of a single, sharply defined variable, but rather in terms of several characteristics, which have the potential of reducing the semantic effect (see Goldfarb, Wirtz, & Anisfeld, 1973; Kadesh, Riese, & Anisfeld, 1976). If a semantic effect is nevertheless found, this will testify to its privileged status for deaf children.

MEMORY

TABLE THE

ANTECEDENT,

Concrete signs 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Abstract signs 6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

489

CODES IN DEAF CHILDREN

EXPERIMENTAL,

AND

7

CONTROL

SIGNS

Cherological relation

III

Control sign

Antecedent sign

Semantic relation

butter paper girl dog chair

bread pencil boy cat table

socks tree book knife fire

stars flag door train snow

iron cup box street ball

fast give stupid noisy work

slow take

please right” wonderful wet party

sorry lastb Sundav soft always

sick sentence dirty guess show

smart quiet play

Antecedent sign

USED IN EXPERIMENT

a Opposite of “wrong.” * Opposite of “first.” The list of signs was so arranged that the two A signs in each cluster were separated by one space, as were the S and K signs of each cluster. The common C sign appeared in the space between the S and K signs. The S and K signs were 10 positions behind their respective A signs. Consider, for example, cluster 4, the cherological A term knife appeared in position 45, the semantic A term dog in position 47, the K term train in position 55, the S term cat in position 57, and the C term street in position 56. Half of the S and half of the K terms appeared before their respective C terms, and half after. This arrangement constituted List 1. List 2 was set up by interchanging, within each cluster, the positions of the semantic A and cherological A terms and those of the S and K terms. Ten fillers were added to facilitate the above ordering and to set up a pattern of repeitions. The first five positions were occupied by fillers. Two fillers were repeated four times each, four were repeated three times each, two were repeated two times each, and two appeared once. The lists thus constructed were recorded and given to the subjects in the same way as in Experiment II. Half of the subjects saw List 1 and half saw List 2. As in Experiment II, half of the subjects in this experiment were asked to identify the signs on the videotape. AlI identifications were perfect, with the exception of one control sign which was occasionally misidentified. The reported sign was, however, as good a control item as the original.

Results and Discussion The overall error rate was 13%. The mean number of errors for the two lists was almost identical (List 1 = 10.18, List 2 = 9.85), as was the mean number of errors for boys and girls (boys = 9.64, girls = 10.00). The error scores were therefore collapsed across both lists and both sexes. The findings of main interest for the present investigation are summarized in Tables 8 and 9. It is quite apparent from these tables that there

490

FRUMKIN

AND ANISFELD TABLE

MEAN

NUMBER

OF ERRORS

TO EXPERIMENTAL

8 AND

Semantic relations Concrete signs Abstract signs

CONTROL

SIGNS

IN EXPERIMENT

Cherological relations

1.59 1.86

III

Controls

1.64 1.31

.45 .45

was an effect for both the semantic relations and the cherological relations for both the Concrete category and the Abstract category. A twoway repeated-measures analysis of variance was carried out. The factors were abstractness (Abstract vs. Concrete) and type of relation (S vs K vs C). The only significant effect was for type of relation, F(2,42) = 17.15, p < .OOl. The Newman-Keuls procedure revealed that the differences between S and C and between K and C were significant (at the .Ol level) but the difference between S and K was not. In view of the issues raised by Clark (see Clark, 1973; Clark, Cohen, Smith, and Keppel, 1976, and references therein), an additional analysis of variance was carried out with abstractness and type of relation as fixed factors and items as a random nested factor. This analysis supported the previous analysis. Abstractness did not yield a significant effect, nor were any of the interactions significant, but the type of relation factor was significant, F’(2,31) = 9.02, p < .Ol. The items factor produced a significant effect, F(24,42) = 2.56, p < .Ol, reflecting a linear trend, F(6,42) = 4.99, p < .Ol. This merely affirms the well-established finding that the later an item appears in the list the more false-recognition errors it produces (e.g., Macleod & Nelson, 1976). TABLE TABULATION

s>c sC K
BY PAIRS

9

OF RESULTS

OF EXPEFUMENT

III”

Abstract signs

Concrete signs

5 0 0 5 0 0

5 0 0 4 1 0

a S > C designates number of pairs (out of five) for which more errors were made to the S sign than to its C mate; S < C, number of pairs with fewer errors to the S sign than to the C sign; S = C, number of pairs with an equal number of errors to the S sign and the C sign. The designations K > C, K < C, and K = C have corresponding meanings.

MEMORY

CODES IN DEAF CHILDREN

491

The main point of the present experiment was in the demonstration that the semantic effect held up for both Abstract and Concrete signs. This further testifies to the generality of the effect. This experiment was not designed to investigate the role of imagery in memory, but it has a bearing on the issue and a brief comment seems in order. In the study mentioned earlier, Conlin and Paivio (1975) found that deaf adults remembered high-imagery words better than low-imagery words. Why then was there no difference here between the Concrete and Abstract signs? Granted that abstractness-concreteness does not correlate perfectly with imagibility, but there is enough of an overlap between the two dimensions that one might have expected an effect. One possibility which seems worth pursuing is that presentation in sign form neutralizes the role of imagery because the potential for iconic suggestibility of many signs may induce imagery even for abstract signs. For instance, we used the sign for show as an Abstract control item. It is produced by pointing the right index finger onto the palm of the left hand facing outwards in front of the signer. Both hands are then moved forward and outward from the body. It seems that this sign is more likely to suggest an image than the word show. (For discussion of the issue of iconicity of signs, see Frishberg, 1975.) GENERAL CONCLUSIONS

In the three experiments described, deaf children were found to use three types of codes in storing linguistic units in memory. When the units were printed words, the deaf children retained their orthographic shape and their semantic content, When the units were signs, they retained the formational properties of the signs and their semantic content. The role of visual properties in the memory of the deaf had previously been demonstrated for letters. The present orthographic effect shows that the visual properties of words also play a role in the memory of the deaf. Cherology as a factor in the memory of the deaf had also been previously identified. In this regard, the value of the present research is in showing the cherological effect with a different method and over longer intervals. Also, earlier research had not studied the orthographic and cherological effects with children. But the central message of the present findings concerns the weighty role of semantic coding in the memory of deaf children, Deaf children are not known to be advanced over their hearing contemporaries (see Furth, 1971). Yet we found that they utilized semantic codes when hearing children of comparable age did not. We have attributed this difference to the fact that deaf children do not have speech to serve as an effective, and distracting, code. The unavailability of speech leads to a greater reliance on semantic codes. The implication of this view is that the formational properties of signs do not have for deaf children the coding prowess that

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speech has for hearing children. Could it be that the human language system was designed to be represented by speech, and no other cipher can fully substitute for it? REFERENCES Anisfeld, M. False recognition produced by semantic and phonetic relations under two presentation rates. Psychonomic Science, 1969, 17, 366-367. Anisfeld, M., & Knapp, M. E. Association, synonymity, and directionality in false recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1968, 77, 171- 179. Bach, M. J., & Underwood, B. J. Developmental changes in memory attributes. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1970, 61,292-2%. Bellugi, U., & Klima, E. S. Aspects of sign language and its structure. In J. F. Kavanagh and J. E. Cutting (Eds.), The role of speech in langugage. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1975. Pp. 171-203. Bellugi, U., Klima, E. S., & Siple, P. A. Remebering in signs. Cognition, 1975, 3, 93- 125. Bryden, M. P., & Allard, F. Visual hemifield differences depend on typeface. Brain and Langugage, 1976,3, 191-200. Carroll, J. B., Davies, P., & Richman, B. Word frequency book. New York: American Heritage, 1971. Chomsky, N., & Halle, M. The sound pattern of English. New York: Harper and Row, 1%8. Clark, H. H. The language-as-fixed-effect fallacy: A critique of language statistics in psychological research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1973, 12,335-359.

Clark, H. H., Cohen, J., Smith, J. E. K., & Keppel, G. Discussion of Wike and Church’s comments. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1976, l&257-266.

Collins, A. M., & Loftus, E. F. A spreading-activation theory of semantic processing. Psychological Review, 1975, 82, 407-428. Conlin, D., & Paivio, A. The associative learning of the deaf: The effects of word imagery and signability. Memory and Cognition, 1975, 3, 335-340. Conrad, R. Short-term memory in the deaf: A test for speech coding. British Journal of Psychology, 1972, 63, 173-180. (a) Conrad, R. Speech and reading. In J. Kavanagh and I. Mattingly (Eds.), Language by ear and by eye: The relationships between speech and reading. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972. (b) Conrad, R. Some correlates of speech coding in the short-term memory of the deaf. Journal of Speech

and Hearing

Research,

1973, 16, 375-384.

Crowder, R. G. Visual and auditory memory. In J. F. Kavanagh and I. G. Mattingly (Eds.), Language by ear and by eye. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972. Eimas, P. D., Siqueland, E. R., Jusczyk, P., &z Vigorito, J. Speech perception in infants. Science, 1971, 171,303-306. Felzen, E., & Anisfeld, M. Semantic and phonetic relations in the false recognition of words by third- and sixth-grade children. Developmental Psychology, 1970, 3, 163168. Frishberg, N. Arbitrariness and iconicity: Historical change in American Sign Language. Language, 1975, 51,6%-719. Furth, H. G. Linguistic deficiency and thinking: Research with deaf subjects, 1964-1%9. Psychological Bulletin, 1971, 76, 58-72. Goldfarb, C., Wirtz, J., & Anisfeld, M. Abstract and concrete phrases in false recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1973, 98,25-30.

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493

Kadesh, I., Riese, M., & Anisfeld, M. Dichotic listening in the study of semantic relations. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1976, 15, 213-225. Kimura, D., & Folb, S. Neural processing of backwards-speech sounds. Science, 1968, 161,395-396. Liberman, A. M. The grammars of speech and language. Cognitive Psychology, 1970, 1, 301-323. Locke, J. L., & Locke, V. L. Deaf children’s phonetic, visual, and dactylic coding in a grapheme recall task. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1971, 89, 142- 146. Macleod, C. M., & Nelson, T. 0. A nonmonotonic lag function for false alarms to associates. American Journal of Psychology, 1976, 89, 127- 135. Moulton, R. D., & Beasley, D. S. Verbal coding strategies used by hearing-impaired individuals. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 1975, l&559-570. Nelson, D. L., & Davis, M. J. Transfer and false recognitions based on phonetic identities of words. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1972, 92, 347-353. Paivio, A. Imagery and Verbal Processes. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971. Postman, L. Verbal learning and memory. Annual Review of Psychology, 1975, 26, 291-335. Silverman-Dresner, T., & Guilfoyle, G. R. Vocabulary norms for deaf children. Washington, D.C.: The Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf, 1972. Stokoe, W. C. Jr. Semiotics and human sign languages. The Hague: Mouton, 1972. Stokoe, W. C. Jr., Casterline, D., & Croneberg, C. A dictionary ofAmerican Sign Language.

Washington,

(Accepted June 8, 1977)

D.C.:

Gallaudet

College

Press,

1%5.