Literacy skills in deaf readers

 描述（由申请人提供）：在聋人群体中实现高水平的阅读熟练度，在研究和实践中都抵制了我们的最大努力[1]。由于缺乏针对聋人读者的基础科学研究，这一领域的进展受到限制。特别是，我们对聋人英语句法加工几乎一无所知。该研究的直接目标是揭示这一人群对英语句子的在线处理和理解的基本事实。长期目标是利用这些知识设计更有效的材料和方法来提高识字率。因此，拟议的研究进一步促进了NIH的使命，即寻求有关生命系统的性质和行为的基本知识，并应用这些知识来增强健康，减少疾病和残疾的负担。本研究的具体目标包括：（1）考察句法复杂性对聋人阅读理解和加工时间的影响;（2）考察个体差异如何调节句法复杂性对加工时间和理解的影响。本实验通过操纵英语句子的句法特征来测量这些操纵对阅读过程中眼动模式的影响。理解的结果也进行了评估。我们将对比聋人读者、听力正常的以英语为第二语言的汉英双语读者和听力正常的英语母语读者的表现。主要的依赖性测量将是注视时间和对理解问题的反应。这些数据将使我们能够确定聋人读者在处理和解释不同句法类型的句子时有多大的困难。除了收集结果数据外，我们还将收集人口统计数据和个人技能和知识的指数，包括执行功能，工作记忆容量，英语词汇和口语沟通能力。我们将应用多级建模技术[9，69]来评估个体读者特征和文本特征如何相互作用以确定处理和理解结果。建议的实验结果将有影响的心理语言学理论的句法处理在聋人和听力双语者，并将扩大调查的听力母语为英语的人之间的句子处理的个体差异。这些实验的结果将通知进一步的实验设计调查的句子处理聋人读者。从这些实验中获得的知识将有助于构建改进的材料和方法，以发展聋人读者的识字技能。研究结果也可能有相关的听力读者的问题，涉及语音过程。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Achieving high levels of reading proficiency in the deaf population has resisted our best efforts in both research and practice [1]. Progress in this area is limited by the lack of basic science research that focuses on deaf readers. In particular, we know almost nothing about syntactic processing of English in deaf readers. The immediate goal of the proposed research is to uncover basic facts about on-line processing and comprehension of English sentences in this population. The long-range goal is to use this knowledge to design more effective materials and methods to enhance literacy. Thus, the proposed research furthers NIH's mission of seeking fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and applying that knowledge to enhance health and reduce the burdens of illness and disability. The specific aims of the project include the following: (1) to investigate the effects of syntactic complexity on processing time and comprehension in deaf readers; (2) to investigate how individual differences moderate the effects of syntactic complexity on processing time and comprehension. The proposed experiments manipulate syntactic properties of English sentences and measure the effects of those manipulations on patterns of eye-movements during reading. Comprehension outcomes are also assessed. We will contrast performance in deaf readers, hearing Chinese-English bilingual readers who have English as a second language, and hearing native English readers. The chief dependent measures will be fixation times and responses to comprehension questions. These data will allow us to determine how much difficulty deaf readers have processing and interpreting sentences of different syntactic types. In addition to collecting outcome data, we will collect demographic data and indices of individual skills and knowledge, including executive function, working memory capacity, English vocabulary, and oral communication ability. We will apply mulitilevel modeling techniques [9, 69] to assess how individual reader characteristics and text characteristics interact to determine processing and comprehension outcomes. The results of the proposed experiments will have implications for psycholinguistic theories of syntactic processing in deaf and hearing bilinguals and will extend the investigation of individual differences in sentence processing among hearing native English speakers. The results of these experiments will inform the design of further experiments investigating sentence processing in deaf readers. The knowledge gained from these experiments will inform efforts to construct improved materials and methods for developing literacy skill in deaf readers. The findings may also have relevance for problems in hearing readers that relate to phonological processes.