青少年聋生的分类学联系

Deaf Adolescents' Representations of Taxonomic Relations

为了考察青少年聋生分类学联系的特点,使用不同类别的基本水平概念,完成了语义归类和错误再认2个实验,并同健听生的结果进行比较。结果表明:⑴聋生和健听生有类似的类别意识,但聋生的类别意识较健听生为弱。⑵与健听生比,呈现方式对聋生的反应影响较小。聋生的分类学概念有较强的形象化倾向。青少年聋生分类学联系的特点与他们语言能力发展迟缓、使用自然手语有关。因此,应加强聋生的规范手语教学,重视培养聋生的抽象思维能力。

Because deaf people differs from hearing people in so many ways, such as using a different language and having a relatively isolated way of living a reasonable hypothesis is that their representation of world knowledge might have some unique characteristics compared to hearing people. In the current study we sought to investigate their representation of taxonomic categories. Our hypothesis was that deaf adolescents had stronger tendency of imagery representation of exemplars and weaker awareness of taxonomic categories than their intelligently-matched hearing counterparts. In experiment 1, 15 deaf adolescents and 15 intelligently-matched hearing counterparts （31 months younger） were recruited to complete a semantic categorization task. There were two groups of experimental stimuli. One was hightypicality group composed of 16 taxonomic categories, in which 3 exemplars of higher typicality and 1 of lower typicality were selected as prime and target. The other was low-typicality group again of 16 taxonomic categories, in which 3 exemplars of lower typicality and 1 of higher typicality were selected as prime and target. All the exemplars from 25 taxonomic categories were presented in forms of words and pictures and subjects＇ reaction time and accuracy were recorded. In experiment 2, 16 deaf adolescents and 16 intelligently-matched hearing counterparts （38 months younger） were recruited to complete a false memory task. There were two kinds of experimental stimuli. The first group was composed of exemplars from 13 categories, in which 3 exemplars of high typicality and 1 of low typicality were used as study item and lure. The second group was composed of exemplars from another 13 categories, in which 3 exemplars of low typicality and 1 of high typicality used as study item and lure. All the exemplars were presented in forms of words and pictures and the purpose was to further test our hypothesis. The results showed for experiment I, both deaf and hearing adolescents responded faster to the stimuli sets in which the primes were exemplars of higher typicality than lower typicality. But deaf adolescents responded slower to picture stimuli than words while hearing adolescents＇ reaction time remained the same. Besides, deaf subjects made more errors when the primes were exemplars of higher typicality. Similar results were obtained from Experiment 2. Deaf adolescents had lower recognition accuracy when target items were of lower typicality while hearing subjects＇ recoguition accuracy was not influenced by exemplar typicality. For the recognition accuracy of lures, deaf subjects made more error than hearing subjects. Furthermore the hearing subjects＇ recognition was influenced by exemplars typicality and item presentation mode while the deaf subjects were not. To sum up, the current study demonstrated that deaf and hearing adolescents had similar typicality awareness. But due to their persistent dependence on the use of sign language, deaf adolescents had weaker awareness of a taxonomic category than their hearing counterparts. Instead, they had a stronger tendency to use imagery representation of taxonomic categories than their hearing counterparts.