Does early exposure to spoken and sign language affect reading fluency in deaf and hard-of-hearing adult signers?
Date
2023-09-20
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Frontiers in Psychology
Abstract
Introduction: Early linguistic background, and in particular, access to language, lays the foundation of future reading skills in deaf and hard-of-hearing signers. The current study aims to estimate the impact of two factors – early access to sign and/or spoken language – on reading fluency in deaf and hard-of-hearing adult Russian Sign Language speakers.
Methods: In the eye-tracking experiment, 26 deaf and 14 hard-of-hearing native Russian Sign Language speakers read 144 sentences from the Russian Sentence Corpus. Analysis of global eye-movement trajectories (scanpaths) was used to identify clusters of typical reading trajectories. The role of early access to sign and spoken language as well as vocabulary size as predictors of the more fluent reading pattern was tested.
Results: Hard-of-hearing signers with early access to sign language read more fluently than those who were exposed to sign language later in life or deaf signers without access to speech sounds. No association between early access to spoken language and reading fluency was found.
Discussion: Our results suggest a unique advantage for the hard-of-hearing individuals from having early access to both sign and spoken language and support the existing claims that early exposure to sign language is beneficial not only for deaf but also for hard-of-hearing children.
Description
This article was originally published in Frontiers in Psychology. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1145638. © 2023 Ziubanova, Laurinavichyute and Parshina.
Keywords
reading fluency, deaf, hard-of-hearing, sign language, multimodal bilingualism, scanpaths, eye movements
Citation
Ziubanova, Anastasia A., Anna K. Laurinavichyute, and Olga Parshina. “Does Early Exposure to Spoken and Sign Language Affect Reading Fluency in Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Adult Signers?” Frontiers in Psychology 14 (September 20, 2023): 1145638. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1145638.