Background

The ways in which students with deafness process syntactic and semantic cues while reading sentences are unclear. While some studies have supported the preference for semantic cues, others have not.

Aim

To examine differences in the processing of syntactic versus semantic cues during sentence reading among students who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH).

Method

Twenty DHH students (mean age = 12.48 years) and 20 chronologically age-matched students with typical hearing (TH) were asked to read sentences written in Spanish with different grammatical structures and to choose the picture that best matched the sentences’ meaning while their eye movements were being registered. The picture options were manipulated so that, in addition to the correct ones, there were lexical distractors and syntactic distractors.

Results

The TH participants outperformed the DHH participants in reading complex sentences but not simple sentences in the active voice. In the correctly answered trials, both groups fixated longer and made more fixations on the target than on the syntactic distractor than on the lexical distractor. DHH participants made significantly longer fixations on the lexical distractions.

Conclusions

Our results did not support a strict preference for either lexical or semantic cues in the DHH participants.

中文翻译：

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三只小猪吓坏了狼吗？聋哑读者如何使用词汇和句法线索来理解句子

背景

聋哑学生在阅读句子时会处理句法和语义提示的方式尚不清楚。尽管有些研究支持了对语义线索的偏爱，但另一些则没有。

目的

在聋哑或听力障碍（DHH）的学生中，考察句子阅读过程中句法和语义线索处理的差异。

方法

要求20名DHH学生（平均年龄= 12.48岁）和20位按时间顺序与年龄匹配且具有典型听力（TH）的学生阅读用西班牙语书写的具有不同语法结构的句子，并选择与他们的眼睛最匹配的句子含义的图片动作正在记录中。对图片选项进行了操纵，以便除了正确的选项外，还有词汇干扰器和句法干扰器。

结果

TH参与者在阅读复杂句子时的表现优于DHH参与者，但在主动语态中阅读的不是简单句子。在正确回答的试验中，两组在目标上的固定时间都比在语法上的干扰物更长，并且在词法上的干扰程度也更多。DHH参与者对词汇干扰力的关注时间大大延长。

结论

我们的结果不支持DHH参与者对词汇或语义线索的严格偏爱。