Do Deaf Children Use Phonological Syllables
as Reading Units?
Catherine Transler
Université de Bourgogne
Jacqueline Leybaert
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Jean-Emile Gombert
Université de Haute Bretagne
This study aimed at examining whether deaf children process
written words on the basis of phonological units. In French,
the syllable is a phonologically and orthographically welldefined unit. French deaf children and hearing children
matched on word recognition level were asked to copy written words and pseudo-words. The number of glances at the
item, copying duration, and the locus of the first segmentation (i.e., after the first glance) within the item were measured. The main question was whether the segments copied
by the deaf children corresponded to syllables as defined by
phonological and orthographic rules.
The results showed that deaf children, like hearing children, used syllables as copying units when the syllable
boundaries were marked both by orthographic and phonological criteria. However, in a condition in which orthographic
and phonological criteria were differentiated, the deaf children did not perform phonological segmentations while the
hearing children did. We discuss two explanatory hypotheses.
First, items in this condition were difficult to decode for deaf
children; second, orthographic units were probably easier to
process for deaf children than phonological units because of
a lack of automaticity in their phonological conversion processes for pseudo-words. Finally, incidental observations during the experimental task raised the question of the use of
fingerspelled units.
This research was supported by grants from the Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique (C.N.R.S.), France (Programme Europe, Département des Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société); from the Direction
Générale de la Recherche Scientifique, Communauté Française de Belgique (A.R.C. 96/01–203) and from the Founds Houtman (Belgium). We
thank Virginie Lasjuilliarias and Delphine Pourquery for their assistance
in testing the children as well as the speech therapists Sylvie Chanusseau
and Michelle Munsch for their help in establishing the speech intelligibility level of deaf children. Correspondence should be sent to Catherine
Transler, L.E.A.D./C.N.R.S.-6, Bd Gabriel-F 21000 Dijon, France (email: [email protected]).
q1999 Oxford University Press.
One of the components of reading activity in normal
hearing children consists of decoding words. To decode a word, the child must establish the correspondence between the written string and the oral string,
that is, the phonological form of the item. More precisely, this cognitive activity has been described as a
grapho-phonemic assembling process: graphemes
(e.g., b, d, th, oo) are associated with the corresponding
phonemes (phonemes are the smallest units that can
differentiate two spoken words; e.g., /b/, /d/, /θ/, /u/).
This assembling process is important because it is a
necessary step in reading development in language
communities with alphabetic writing systems (Frith,
1985; Goswami & Bryant, 1990; Harris & Coltheart,
1986; Marsh, Friedman, Welch, & Desberg, 1981;
Morton, 1989; Seymour, 1997).
However, the existence of such an assembling process among deaf children has been questioned. Some
authors have argued that deaf children cannot “think
of the sounds” of language. Consequently, they believe
that deaf people cannot associate written forms with
their phonological correspondents. Indeed, some deaf
children have failed to exhibit experimental effects
that reveal phonological assembling1 during reading
whereas hearing children have. This has been observed
most frequently in lexical decision tasks (Burden &
Campbell, 1994; Harris & Beech, 1994; Waters &
Doehring, 1990). Nevertheless, prelingually severe and
profoundly deaf children have shown a sensitivity to
certain phonological characteristics of words in various
other reading, spelling, and memory tasks. Experi-
Syllabic Units in Deaf Children’s Reading
ments based on short-term memory paradigms have
shown effects of the phonological characteristics of the
list to be remembered (Conrad, 1979; Hanson, 1982;
Hanson, Liberman, & Shankweiler, 1984; Lichstenstein, 1998; Reynolds, 1986). Spelling paradigms have
revealed the existence of phonological processes: deaf
youngsters are sensitive to the sound-to-spelling regularity2 (Burden & Campbell, 1994; Dodd, 1980, with
mixed results; Hanson, Shankweiler, & Fisher, 1983;
Leybaert & Alegria, 1995); their errors also revealed
the presence of phonological processes (Padden, 1993).
In reading, different paradigms have also revealed the
intervention of phonological processes in deaf children
(see Leybaert, 1993, and Marschark, 1993, for reviews): letter cancellation tasks (Chen, 1976; Dodd,
1987; Gibbs, 1989; Leybaert, 1980; Quinn, 1981; but
see also Locke, 1978, for negative results); probe letter
recognition task (Hanson, 1986); reading aloud paradigms (Leybaert, 1993; but also see Beggs, Breslaw, &
Wilkinson, 1982, for contradictory results in younger
deaf readers). Finally, evidence for phonological coding
has also been provided by the Stroop paradigm,3 suggesting that the phonological form of the written words
is processed automatically by some deaf people (Leybaert & Alegria, 1993; Leybaert, Alegria, & Fonck,
1983). As a matter of fact, these results are not contradictory but complementary because several factors influence the emergence of phonological processes in
deaf people. The emergence of assembling processes in
reading depends on the individual characteristics of the
deaf people who are involved in the study. Indeed, the
utilization of phonological assembling processes in
reading depends on the previous development of children’s sensitivity to the phonological structure of environmental spoken language (Gombert, 1992). But this
development varies greatly among deaf children. The
assembling process also depends on the experimental
paradigms used (for a review, see Campbell, 1994) and
to some extent on the material (unfamiliar words for
pseudo-words mobilized more phonological strategies
than familiar words).
Our study was designed to take this issue further
by investigating the reading unit characteristics of deaf
participants. To this end, deaf children were faced with
a situation they often meet at school: they simply had
to copy written words and pseudo-words (pseudo-
125
words can be pronounced as words but have no
meaning).
Reading Units for Hearing and for Deaf People
The assembling process described above not only consists of establishing the correspondence between one
grapheme and one phoneme. A simultaneous correspondence may also be established between multiple
graphemes and multiple phonemes. These grapheme
groups are not formed randomly. On the contrary, they
are organized into reading units. The existence of
intermediate reading units between the whole word
and the letter level is established and accepted by many
specialists (Prinzmetal, Treiman, & Rho, 1986; Santa,
Santa, & Smith, 1977).
Most authors agree that reading units correspond
to morpho-phonological units (syllables, rhymes, i.e.,
the end of a syllable composed of the vowel possibly
plus the following consonants, morphemes, etc.) that
are important in oral language. This phenomenon is
particularly obvious for children: for instance, the
reading aloud of pseudo-words not only depends on a
regular grapho-phonemic assembling in English children; their reading is also significantly influenced by
the earlier pronunciation of words sharing the same
rime (Goswami, 1988, 1993). Reading in teenagers and
adults is a matter of considerable debate: do reading
units correspond to phonological units or do they correspond to orthographic units? Indeed, some authors
have argued that reading units are defined by the statistical characteristics of the letter strings of written language, that is, orthographic redundancy (Seidenberg,
1987; Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989). Conversely,
Rapp (1992) has shown that phonological units (syllables in this case) produced a facilitation effect on
word reading when the frequency of the letter strings
was systematically controlled. This debate indicates
that the question of how reading units are related to
phonological units can be studied, provided that bigram frequencies are taken into account.
If we consider that reading units are linked to phonological units in people who can hear, we may wonder
what kind of units are processed by deaf people in
whom the audio-oral process of language is impaired.
To our knowledge, only studies in English have raised
126
Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 4:2 Spring 1999
the problem of reading units in deaf children. Gibson,
Shurcliff, and Yonas (1970) asked American deaf and
hearing participants to write down sequences of letters
presented for a duration of 100 msec. The deaf participants were 34 youngsters at Gallaudet College with a
congenitally or very early “maximal hearing loss.” Both
groups achieved better performances for pronounceable sequences (e.g., glurck) than for nonpronounceable
ones (e.g., ckurgl). The authors concluded that orthographic redundancy rules were used by deaf subjects
even though they could not use pronounceability.
However, in their study, high orthographic redundancy
could not be differentiated from the pronounceability
of the written material.
This question was addressed again by Hanson
(1986). The deaf participants were undergraduates or
recent graduates of Gallaudet College; they were all
prelingually and profoundly deaf. The deaf students
were categorized into two groups on the basis of their
speech intelligibility. A control group of hearing students was formed and was matched on the level of accuracy in the experimental task. The subjects first saw
a 6-letter sequence for about 100 msec and then had to
judge whether a probe letter belonged to the sequence
or not. Hanson manipulated two factors: the bigram
positional frequencies of the sequences (low versus
high), and orthographic regularity (pronounceable versus unpronounceable sequences). She found that the
deaf participants displayed the same sensitivity as the
hearing subjects to the positional frequency information. In the deaf group, sensitivity to sequence pronounceability varied with speech intelligibility, good
speakers showing a greater pronounceability effect
than poor speakers. This study thus indicated that deaf
readers may make use of a mapping between written
and spoken language.
Yet the type of units deaf people process was not
studied directly. In the light of this experimental background, our aim was to investigate one phonological
reading unit in French deaf people: the syllable. There
are strong reasons for considering the syllable to be a
reading unit in the French language.
Syllable Is a Reading Unit in French
The syllable is a basic unit in the spoken chain. Linguists define the syllable as a fundamental structure (an
elementary scheme, Jackobson, 1963) that brings together phonemes of the spoken chain (Dubois et al.,
1991): the syllable is a period centered around a peak
of sound energy realized during articulation (Lerot,
1993). There is a considerable consensus that in
French, as well as in English, one vowel (and only one)
determines the peak of the syllable; the other phonemes constitute the margins of the syllable. Syllabication rules in spoken French are generally clearer than
in English; this is also the case in written language4 (for
French, see Dubois et al. 1991; Ducrot & Todorov,
1972; Jackobson, 1963; Lerot, 1993; and for English see
Clements & Keyser, 1983; Fowler, Treiman, & Gross,
1993; Kreidler, 1989; Selkirk, 1984).
We focused our interest on the syllable because it
serves as a reading unit for experienced as well as for
beginning readers of French. As far as experienced
readers are concerned, it has been shown that the first
syllable of a word is detected faster than a unit corresponding to the syllable plus or minus one letter by
French listeners (Mehler, Dommergues, Frauenfelder, & Segui, 1981; Segui, 1984). This phenomenon
of speech perception has also been found for speech
production: adults named words and pseudo-words
faster when the targets were primed by a syllable than
when they were primed by a syllable plus or minus one
letter (Ferrand, Segui, & Grainger, 1996). Other authors have found that the pronunciation of the vowel
“e” in nonwords is strongly influenced by a prime consisting of the phonological syllable, but less so by nonsyllabic units (Taft & Radeau, 1995). In English language studies, recent results from adults also suggest
that the syllable may be a unit in naming, that is, in
speech production, but only in the case of words with
clear syllabic boundaries (Ferrand, Segui, & Humphreys, 1997).
The high salience of the syllable in spoken French
leads one to assume that it should be a preferred reading unit for beginning French readers (Seymour, 1996).
This assumption was confirmed in the study conducted by Colé and Magnan (1997). Using Ferrand
et al.’s paradigm (1996), these authors observed that
children’s word naming responses were faster for words
primed with a written segment corresponding to the
target’s first syllable than for words primed by the syllable plus or minus one letter.
Although the syllable is a reading unit in French,
Syllabic Units in Deaf Children’s Reading
this may not be true in all languages. In English in particular, there is more evidence in favor of the importance of the rhyme for learner readers. It is well established that the rhyme is used by English learner readers
(Bowey, 1996; Coltheart & Leahy, 1992; Goswami,
1988, 1991, 1993). French children exhibit a lower sensitivity to rhyme than their English peers when reading
pseudo-words aloud (Gombert, Bryant, & Warrick,
1997; Goswami, Gombert, & Fraca de Barrera, 1998).
In fact, the fact that the relevant reading units vary between languages constitutes a strong argument in favor
of the interdependence of phonological units and reading units in development.
The number of syllables in one word is an item of
phonological information that may be accessible to deaf
people. Indeed, the syllable is the basic unit of articulation and most of the deaf participants in experimental
studies have received speech therapy. Thus, the syllable
could be a language processing unit for deaf people.
Certain experimental arguments lend support to this
hypothesis. These experiments were performed with
English-speaking deaf people. Campbell and Wright
(1990) showed that deaf teenagers with intelligible
speech were sensitive to word length within a picture
memorization paradigm: recall of lists of trisyllabic
words was significantly worse than that of lists of
mono- and bisyllabic words. Sterne (1996) also showed
that prelingually and profoundly deaf children (six
were educated in a strictly oral fashion and eight were
in a total communication setting) were able to make
word length judgments for words pairs represented by
pictures. He presented two pictures representing a
word of five or six letters in length corresponding to
either one or three syllables (e.g., a fridge and a banana;
a swing and a piano). The children were asked to
choose the picture that corresponded to the “longer
word.” The deaf children, like the hearing children
(matched on real age), were able to identify the longer
words on the basis of the pictures. These results
showed that deaf children have activated phonological
representations of words and that this phonological information consists of the number of syllables from
which the word is formed.
These results, together with the status of the syllable in spoken language, and in particular in French,
lead us to assume that deaf children could develop a
sensitivity to the syllabic nature of spoken French. If
127
this is the case, this sensitivity would have repercussions on the reading units used by deaf beginning readers, as is the case for French hearing children.
The Copy Paradigm
We were interested in a paradigm that was able to provide evidence of the reading units used by children and
that would enable us to analyze the syllabic or nonsyllabic nature of those reading units. We chose a paradigm that (1) does not necessitate reading aloud;
(2) permits the use of pseudo-words (as we have noted,
pseudo-words are particularly powerful activators of
assembling in reading); and (3) represents a common
activity for deaf pupils. This paradigm is a copy paradigm involving words and pseudo-words.
The principle of the copy paradigm is that a child
has to copy a word presented in its written form; since
the word is too long to be copied at a single glance, the
child has to look at the item several times: he looks at
the word, then write down one or more letters, then
looks at the word a second time to write down the following letters, and so on. The segmentations made by
the children might reveal their representational units.
Those representational units are likely to correspond
to phonological units. The assumption is that children
look at the word for the first time, they read it, and the
phonological form of the word is activated.
The copy paradigm has already revealed the use of
syllabic units among hearing French-speaking children. Studies conducted by Lambert and Espéret
(1997) have examined the role of the syllable in a delayed copy task. In this task, subjects had to read a word
and to write it down on a graphic tablet after a short
delay (the graphic tablet made it possible to record the
movements of the pen during writing). Their results
suggested that the syllable is a processing unit for expert readers and also for third and fifth graders. Rieben, Meyer, and Perregaux (1991) observed children in
their classroom. A text (composed of several sentences)
containing new vocabulary chosen by children was
written on a board and studied in the classroom. The
children had to produce a new text formed using the
same vocabulary as that written on the board. The way
the children copied words during their composition
was analyzed. The authors observed that after a few
months of schooling, the children developed syllabic
128
Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 4:2 Spring 1999
copying strategies. The use of syllabic strategies preceded the copying of the whole word at once. However,
this method did not enable Rieben et al. to control
word characteristics from a phonological or orthographic point of view (see also Rieben & SaadaRobert, 1997).
Studies by Humblot, Fayol, and Lonchamp (1994)
implemented a more classical experimental situation.
Children (grades 1 and 2) had to copy twenty bisyllabic
words that varied as a function of their regularity and
familiarity. The regular words could be correctly pronounced by applying grapho-phonological rules (the
irregular words contained one letter that was not pronounced); familiarity was defined as the fact that the
words were known to the children (it was assessed by
five teachers of grades 1 and 2). The words were presented in such a way that the children had to turn their
head and look sideways. The results showed that familiar and regular words were copied with fewer glances
than less familiar words and irregular words. As in Rieben et al.’s study, children at the beginning of the first
grade copied words in sequences of one or two letters
that did not correspond to syllables. The syllable
seemed to become a unit of information processing for
children in the middle of first grade. The use of the
syllable copy strategy varied with word familiarity and
regularity: the more regular and the more familiar the
words, the sooner syllabic copying appeared. Humblot
et al. concluded that the syllabic strategy indicated the
use of phonological processes in copying.
Our Study
The studies mentioned above have shown that syllabic
units are processed during copying performed by
French hearing children. Humblot’s paradigm could
provide a way of assessing whether deaf children process words into phonological units during reading, as
do hearing children. In order to test the phonological
hypothesis, we controlled for the frequency effects of
bigrams.
The participants in the study consisted of severely
and profoundly deaf children and hearing children
from different schools. The deaf children were affected
by a prelingual deafness (detected before they were 2
years old). They wore hearing aids (no cochlear im-
plant) and there was no HF system at school (i.e., amplification of teacher’s speech). Most of them had hearing parents. Their every-day communication at school
took the form of sign communication. At lessons, their
linguistic environment varied slightly from one school
to the other. What all the schools had in common was
the fact that sign communication alternated with the
French version of Cued Speech (Cornett, 1967). More
precisely, most of the time, the adults produced signs
and spoke aloud at the same time; however, at other
times, the adults no longer produced signs, but used
Cued Speech instead. The cued versions of words were
given to children after they had understood the meaning of the words and sentences. Cued Speech was always used when administering the reading and spelling
instruction. The letters were linked with phonemes
that result from lip-reading together with the movements and position of the hand around the face (see
Leybaert & Charlier, 1996, for a description of Cued
Speech).
To control the linguistic characteristics of our participants as closely as possible, we applied pretests. Indeed, several variables affect the development of phonological skills in deaf children. These variables are of
three types: auditory, visual, and articulatory. First, the
impact of sensory impairment varies greatly, depending on the degree of hearing loss and the degree
of improvement with acoustical or electrical prostheses.
Phonological abilities are more developed in children
with better residual hearing (Conrad, 1979). Second,
the ability to perceive oral language visually also varies
between deaf children. There are strong interindividual differences in speechreading abilities (Dodd &
Murphy, 1992), which predict phonological skills and
oral language development (Dodd & Hermelin, 1977).
The ability to perceive speech visually also depends on
whether children have been educated with phonetically
augmented systems like Cued Speech (Alegria, Charlier, & Matthys, in press; Leybaert, Alegria, Hage, &
Charlier, 1998; Nicholls, 1979; Nicholls & Ling, 1982;
Périer, Charlier, Hag, & Alegria, 1988). Children exposed early and intensively to Cued Speech develop accurate phonological representations, leading to better
rhyming skills (Charlier & Leybaert, in press; Leybaert & Charlier, 1996). Third, the intelligibility of
speech also explains a part of the individual variations
Syllabic Units in Deaf Children’s Reading
in phonological skills (Conrad, 1979; Leybaert & Alegria, 1995). However, the impact of speech production
skills on phonological processes used in reading should
be less important than that of speech perception skills
(Leybaert et al., 1998). All these factors are involved to
a greater or lesser extent in variations of reading processes in deaf people. That is the reason why children’s
speech production and speech perception levels were
controlled for by means of pretests.
In the present experiment, Humblot et al.’s copying
paradigm (1994) was used. The targets varied in lexicality (words and pseudo-words) and length (monosyllabic and trisyllabic items). Video recordings of the
children’s copying operations enabled us to measure
copying duration, number of glances, type of segmentation (i.e., glances), and errors.
129
“nonsyllabic.” A variation in the children’s first segments on these items as a function of syllabic boundaries would constitute strong evidence for their use of
phonological processes: hearing children should produce more syllabic than nonsyllabic segmentations.
The important question was whether deaf children (or
some of them) would exhibit the same tendency.
Finally, we also analyzed copying errors. Of particular interest are orthographic errors that respect the
phonology of items (e.g., téléfonne instead of téléphone,
where both -onne and -one represent /ɔn/). We wanted
to observe whether (and which) deaf children would
make this kind of mistake.
Method
Participants
Hypotheses
Real words should be copied with fewer glances than
pseudo-words because the former are known and familiar to all subjects. Long items should be copied with
more glances than shorter items. These length and lexicality effects might reveal the sensitivity of the copying
task to lexical processing.
First, deaf children were expected to copy trisyllabic items syllable by syllable, as hearing children do.
To check this point, we considered the first segments
(part of items) that were copied in one glance. The
children’s first segmentations should thus correspond
to the spoken syllabic boundary in a certain number of
cases (e.g., champignon “mushroom” will be copied as
cham/pignon or champi/gnon). But in this case, the syllables were defined by both orthographic and phonological boundaries, because these two boundaries coincided
/ʃã - pi - ®õ/.
In order to distinguish between the phonological and orthographic criteria, we created a supplementary condition with five pairs of pseudo-words. The
pseudo-words had a different syllabic structure while
being orthographically very similar to one another (e.g,
rentala versus renalat). The first syllabic boundary
came after the “n” in the case of rentala (ren/ta/la) and
before the “n” in the case of renala (re/na/la). In both
cases, those segmentations were “syllabic” whereas
segmentations like ren/alat and re/ntala would be
Experimental group. Twenty-one deaf children from six
special education classes in two different areas (Burgundy and Champagne) took part in the study. Their
every-day communication was signed (French Sign
Language, FSL). At school, they were educated both
in FSL and spoken language. Nineteen children had
hearing parents, one had a hearing father and a deaf
mother and one had two deaf parents. The mean age of
the group was 10 years 6 months (range 7y, 5m to 12y,
4m). They did not suffer from any psychological, sensory, or motor handicap not explained by their deafness
(evaluated by psychologists at their schools). Their intellectual level was normal according to psychologists’
evaluations made less than 1 year before our experiment (performance tests from the revised Wechsler intelligence scale, French version). Their vision was normal or corrected by glasses. Their hearing loss was
severe or profound: more than 70 dB measured on 3
frequency (.5, 1, 2 kHz) pure-tone average audiometric
thresholds for better ear without hearing aid. Their
hearing loss was detected before they were 2 years old.
With hearing aids, their hearing loss was 32 to 40 dB
for 7 children, 40 to 50 dB for 7 children; and more
than 50 dB for 7 children (cf. Table 1 for more details).
Control group matched on lexical level. A control group of
hearing children consisted of 21 normal hearing children from grades 2 and 3 (CE1 and CE2 in France).
Table 1 Characteristics of hearing and deaf subjects, ages, and scores on pretests
Lexical
decision:
correct
recognition
(/20)
Lexical
decision:
correct
responses
(/40)a
Speech
perception
level (/38)
Auditive
loss with
hearing aidb
Speech
intelligibility
(/5)
Deaf participants
D1
144
D2
145
D3
131
D4
113
D5
101
D6
111
D7
116
D8
139
D9
122
D10
113
D11
103
D12
132
D13
89
D14
129
D15
139
D16
146
D17
121
D18
135
D19
147
D20
148
D21
131
Mean
126.4
6
6
6
6
6
7
8
8
10
10
11
11
11
12
13
14
15
15
16
20
20
11.0
20
20
22
26
30
27
28
28
19
20
20
24
31
29
25
25
29
35
34
36
39
27
29
15
20
38
16
12
6
15
28
37
36
21
34
26
22
27
22
18
32
36
35
25
37
35
68
43
43
48
60
37
35
32
38
45
42
53
88
60
42
53
48
30
52
47.2
4
1.5
2.5
2.5
1.5
1.5
1
2
2.5
5
4
1.5
4
3
1
2.5
1
2
2.5
2.5
2.5
2.4
Hearing participants
H1
86
H2
84
H3
95
H4
93
H5
90
H6
91
H7
90
H8
93
H9
93
H10
98
H11
85
H12
89
H13
95
H14
86
H15
90
H16
92
H17
87
H18
99
H19
99
H20
92
H21
96
Mean
91.6
5
6
7
8
8
6
7
8
8
9
10
9
11
10
11
11
13
12
19
19
20
10.3
13
13
13
14
14
14
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
20
22
24
24
28
37
39
40
20.7
Participants
Age
(months)
Correct recognition of words plus correct rejections of nonwords.
a
Three frequency (.5, 1, 2 kHz) pure-tone average audiometric thresholds for better ear.
b
Syllabic Units in Deaf Children’s Reading
Their mean age was 7 years and 7 months (range 7y to
8y, 3m). They all were native French speakers. None of
them had repeated a school year. Both classes came
from the same school in Burgundy. The majority of the
hearing children came from middle-class backgrounds
in a rural area as did the deaf children.
They were matched with the deaf group for lexical
accuracy assessed by a lexical decision task: all the children were given a list containing 20 words and 20
pseudo-words randomly mixed up. The words were
chosen from the words that were recognized by the majority of children in the very first lexical decision task
(see the experimental items selection below). The children had to process as many items as they could in a
fixed time of 1 minute. The instructions explained that
the list contained real words that they could recognize
and pseudo-words that were invented and that they
could not recognize. They had to write down a “1” in
front of the words they knew and a “2” in front of
the words they did not recognize. Four training items
enabled us to ensure the children had understood the
instructions correctly. The test was administered collectively. The score was the number of words correctly
identified (so the correct recognition score was on a
20-point scale).
The mean for the hearing group was 10.3 (SD 5
4.3) and the mean for the deaf group was 11 (SD 5
4.4). The difference between the two groups was not
significant (t(40) , 1). Twenty-eight deaf children
were originally tested, but nine of them were eliminated because they could not be matched with hearing
children: their scores on the lexical decision task were
lower than those of the hearing children in grade 2.
Material
To help us select words familiar to deaf participants,
we administered a lexical decision task. Three hundred
written items, 100 pronounceable pseudo-words and
200 words (monosyllabic and trisyllabic), were presented one by one. The participants were asked to sort
the stimuli into two categories of known and unknown
items: they had to enter the known words in an appropriate envelope and throw away words that they could
not recognize. To this end, they were informed that
131
some of the words were real whereas others were invented. The correct response rate for words was 40%.
Only 4% of pseudo-words were not thrown away. This
revealed that the subjects were not responding by
chance. The experimental items were selected from
among the words recognized by more than half of the
subjects. The selected words were all regular for reading; that is, they can be read on the basis of regular
grapho-phonological rules. They did not contain consonant clusters (consonants corresponding to several
phonemes, like “vr,” “st”) in order to avoid problem in
syllabic boundary definitions. However, all the items
contained at least one plurigraph (a plurigraph is a
string of two or three letters corresponding to only one
phoneme, e.g., in French “ph” is always pronounced
“/f/”). According to their teachers, the words were familiar to the hearing subjects.
The stimuli consisted of (see Appendix for details):
1. Ten four-letter monosyllabic words (e.g., juin,
“June”).
2. Ten trisyllabic words. Their length varied between 7 and 10 letters (e.g., champignon, “ mushroom”).
3. Ten monosyllabic pseudo-words. These had the
same phonological structure as the monosyllabic words
and were constructed by a process of grapheme permutation (e.g., jain, derived from juin “June” and main
“hand”).
4. Ten trisyllabic pseudo-words. They were
formed using syllables coming from different trisyllabic words. For instance, rapilon is created with the
first syllable of the word ramasser “to gather up” and
syllables from champignon “mushroom” and pantalon
“trousers.”
5. Five trisyllabic pseudo-words (named the nV
items) were matched with five other items (named nC
items). The nV and nC items had a different phonological structure whereas orthographically they were very
similar. Their beginnings were identical: phon; ren; con;
pan; chan. However, their syllabic boundary varied depending on the letter following “n.” In the nC items,
“n” was followed by a consonant, so “n” was integrated
in the first phonological and orthographic syllable (e.g.,
phongarcho is pronounced /fõgarʃo/; the first syllable is
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Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 4:2 Spring 1999
/fõ/; the syllabic boundary comes after the letter “n”).
In the nV items, “n” was followed by a vowel, so it became the first consonant of the second syllable (e.g.,
phonarcho is pronounced /fonarʃo/; the first syllable is
/fo/; the syllabic boundary comes after the first vowel,
i.e., after the V position).
The bigram frequencies were controlled on the basis of the French database BRULEX (Content, Radeau, & Mousty, 19885). The mean frequency of all the
bigrams was 1,478 per million (SD 5 995) for nC items
and 1,520 (SD 5 963) for nV items. The difference was
not significant (t(4) 5 1.68; p . .05). We also checked
the frequency of bigrams formed with the letter “n”
letter followed by either a consonant in nC items (e.g.,
ng of phongarcho) or by a vowel in nV items (e.g., na of
phonarcho). The difference between nC frequency (514;
SD 5 567) and nV frequency (423; SD 5 240) was not
significant (t(4) , 1; ns). The frequencies of bigrams
corresponding to the vowel and the letter “n” were of
course strictly equal for nC and nV (1,696; SD 5 251),
because they were the same in every pair of items (e.g.,
on in phongarcho and phonarcho). However, their mean
frequency was higher than the mean frequency of the
bigrams formed with “n” plus the following letter
(t(4) 5 6.1; p , .01 for nC; t(4) 5 10.3; p , .001 for
nV). In the same way, a bigram like on was more frequent than no and ng; but bigrams like no and ng did
not have a significantly different bigram frequency.
This point will be important for the interpretation of
certain results.
Procedure
Pretests. In order to judge their speech intelligibility, we
asked the deaf children to name nine simple colors and
ten digits presented on a page. Their productions were
tape-recorded and judged by two independent speech
therapists who have regularly worked with deaf people
over a period of several years. They had to score the
intelligibility of the children’s oral productions on a
5-point scale: 1 corresponding to unintelligible speech
and 5 corresponding to very intelligible. None of their
scores differed by more than one point for any of the
children. Thanks to this consistency between the
scores, we were able to decide that the children’s global
speech intelligibility score should be the mean of both
speech therapists’ scores.
A speech perception test was adapted from Boon’s
clinical test (1995) for speech therapists. Pseudowords, words, and sentences were presented in Cued
Speech plus oral speech. All the items were repeated
three times. The children had to choose the written
form of the item from among alternatives that have a
similar coding or a similar lip-read image: they had to
choose 16 pseudo-words (from among 6 choices in each
case); 18 words (4 choices); and 4 sentences (4 choices).
The final score was the sum of the correct responses
(maximum 5 38). Thus, this test is not only a measure
of Cued Speech perception but also a more general
measure of deaf children’s ability to perceive oral language and to establish a correspondence with its written form.
All the instructions were given in FSL, because
Sign language was the form of communication used
most frequently by the participants. Only items used in
Boon’s speech perception test were given in Cued
Speech (but instructions were also given in Sign language).
Experimental task. The items were presented behind the
children’s backs. The children had to turn around to
see them before copying them down. When the child
was turning around to see the stimulus, the experimenter issued a light signal within camera shot (see experimental device in Figure 1). This signal made it possible to measure the copying duration. The child’s
hand was filmed during copying.
The items were printed in lower case letters (Times
New Roman, 1.2 3 1.9 cm) on a white card (21 3
30cm) presented at a distance of 2 meters. The list of
45 stimuli was divided into two parts (27 and 28 stimuli). Half of the participants were presented the first
part during the first session and the second part during
the second session and vice versa for the other half of
the participants. The nC items were included in the
first part, and the nV items were included in the second
part. The nC and nV items were thus not presented in
the same session (e.g., phonarcho and phongarcho were
not presented in the same session). In each session,
items were presented in the same random order to all
Syllabic Units in Deaf Children’s Reading
133
Figure 1 Experimental device.
participants. The children were told (in FSL for deaf
children): “I will show you one word here, look at it.
On this page you have to copy the same word, exactly
the same. When you have finished, take a new page
here and carry on with the next word that I show you.”
The experimental list was preceded by two training
items in each session that were not taken into account
in the results.
Hearing children and deaf children were seen in
three and four separate sessions, respectively: once collectively (twice for the deaf children) and twice individually (all). First, the deaf children were seen once 1
month before the experiment involving the lexical decision task leading to the selection of the word items
(30 minutes). One or two weeks before the experimental task, all the participants were given the fixed time
lexical decision task collectively in their classroom (a
few minutes). In the case of the deaf children, this task
was followed by the speech perception test (45 minutes). The children were then seen in two individual
sessions for the experimental task (about 20 minutes
each time). The tape recordings for speech intelligibility evaluation were made at the beginning of the first
individual session.
Results
Length and Lexicality Effects: The Sensitivity
of the Task
The aim of these first analyses was to determine
whether the deaf and hearing subjects made an equal
number of segmentations (i.e., glances) back to a stimulus while copying it. A second objective was to ensure
that our task would be sensitive to the difficulty of the
material. Long items should obviously involve more
segmentations than short items, and pseudo-words
should involve more segmentations than words. Two
measures were taken as dependent variables: numbers
of glances and copy duration. A glance was counted
each time the child looked at the item and copied a part
of the item. Consecutive glances with no copying in between were counted as only one glance. The copying
duration was measured from the beginning of the first
glance (when the experimenter gave the light signal) to
the point at which copying of the item terminated. The
mean numbers of glances and mean duration of copy
are presented in Table 2.
The data were analyzed using an ANOVA with
participants as a random factor (F1) and then with
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Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 4:2 Spring 1999
Table 2 Mean numbers (N) of glances (and standard deviation) and mean copying times in seconds (T) (and standard
deviation) as a function of the length and lexicality of items, for deaf and hearing participants
Deaf (n5 21)
N
Monosyllabics
W (10 items)
PW (10 items)
Trisyllabics
W (10 items)
PW (10 items)
Means (/10)
Hearing (n5 21)
T
N
Combined (n5 42)
T
N
T
1.08
(0.13)
1.18
(0.21)
5.36
(1.18)
5.72
(1.38)
1.10
(0.12)
1.15
(0.16)
6.90
(1.98)
7.34
(1.96)
1.09
(0.12)
1.17
(0.18)
6.13
(1.79)
6.53
(1.87)
2.02
(0.89)
2.64
(0.86)
1.73
(0.89)
12.86
(3.38)
13.87
(2.92)
9.45
(4.60)
1.72
(0.55)
2.24
(0.68)
1.55
(0.64)
14.43
(3.50)
15.68
(4.41)
11.08
(5.06)
1.87
(0.74)
2.44
(0.79)
1.64
(0.78)
13.65
(3.49)
14.77
(3.80)
10.27
(4.89)
stimuli as a random factor (F2). Those double analyses
were made for all ANOVAs in this study. Indeed, this
double approach is very important in studying deaf
populations using linguistic stimuli.6 The data were
analyzed using a 2 3 2 3 2 design (Hearing status
[Hearing vs. Deaf ] 3 Length [monosyllabic vs. trisyllabic] 3 Lexicality [words vs. pseudo-words]) with repeated measures on the last two factors.
Participants made more glances and took more
time for trisyllabic than for monosyllabic items
(glances: F1(1, 40) 5 106.86, p , .001; F2(1, 36) 5
111.4, p , .001; duration: F1(1, 40) 5 529.68, p ,
0.001; F2(1, 18) 5 319.94, p , .001). They also made
more glances and took more time for pseudo-words
than for words (glances: F1(1, 40) 5 103.33, p , .001;
F2(1, 36) 5 11.3, p , .01; duration: F1(1, 40) 5 21.16,
p , .001; F2(1, 18) 5 1.97, ns). The effect of lexicality
was much more important for trisyllabics than for
monosyllabics (interaction measured on glances: F1(1,
40) 5 52.86, p , .001; F2(1, 36) 5 6.85, p , .05; duration: F1(1, 40) 5 6.50, p , .02; F2(1, 18) , 1, ns).
Thus, copying seemed to be facilitated when items
were known and when they were short. Lexicality did
not affect monosyllabics because many of these items
were copied in only one glance.
There was a significant effect of Hearing status on
the glance measure only when items were taken as the
random factor (F1(1, 40) 5 1.92, ns; F2(1, 36) 5 55.37,
p , .001). It is more likely that the tendency of hearing
subjects to make fewer glances than the experimental
group did not reach a significant level because of the
heterogeneity of the deaf population (SD 5 0.89 in
deaf participants and 0.64 in hearing participants).
That is why we consider this effect to be only a tendency. This Hearing status effect did not interact significantly with any other factor.
Deaf children copied the items faster than their
hearing peers (F1(1, 40) 5 4.61, p 5 .05; F2(1, 18) 5
10.85, p , .004). This effect of Hearing status did not
interact with the effects of the material.
Thus, effects of length and of lexicality were identified both for the number of glances and for the copy
duration, showing that the task was sensitive to the
difficulty of the material: words were copied faster and
with fewer glances than pseudo-words, so were short
items compared with long items. We also wanted to
control the matching of experimental and control
groups. Effects due to the material were similar in both
groups (no interaction) despite faster copying by the
deaf participants. This latter phenomenon is easily explained by the fact that the deaf children were older
than the hearing children. The similarity of the effects
of the material in both groups validates our choice of
the control group and permits the following qualitative
analysis concerning the nature of units copied in one
glance.
Syllabic Units in Deaf Children’s Reading
135
Figure 2 Mean number of syllabic and nonsyllabic segmentations made on the
20 trisyllabic items by deaf and hearing participants (and chance level).
Syllabic Segments
Hearing children were expected to make more syllabic
segmentations than nonsyllabic ones. This means that
they should stop their copying more often between two
syllables (on the syllabic boundary) than within a syllable. The question was whether deaf children would use
syllables as units for copying. Only the segments to be
copied of trisyllabic items (words and pseudo-words)
were taken into account because of the low numbers
of segmentations for monosyllabic items (see Table 2).
These first segments were classified into syllabic or
nonsyllabic segments. The syllabic segments corresponded to a glance at the end of the first syllable (e.g.,
cham/pignon) or at the end of the second syllable (e.g.,
champi/gnon). Nonsyllabic segments corresponded to a
glance before the end of the first syllable (e.g., cha/
mpignon), between the first and second syllable (e.g.,
champ/ignon), or before the end of the word (e.g., champigno/n).
To simplify presentation, the results obtained for
words and pseudo-words have been processed together.
The sum of the syllabic and nonsyllabic segments was
computed for each participant. The scores were converted with a view to making it possible to compare
participants’ scores regardless of the number of nonsegmented items: each individual score was changed to
a score out of 20. For instance, if a subject had not segmented 8 items (of the 20 trisyllabics, this subject
would have copied 8 in only one glance), only 12 items
were segmented. On the basis of this example, let us
imagine that this subject made four syllabic segmentations. His score of 4/12 became 6.66/20. This conversion was necessary to eliminate the effect of items
copied in only one glance, that is, without any segmentation. The mean numbers of syllabic and nonsyllabic
segmentations on trisyllabic items as a function of their
type are presented in Figure 2 for deaf and hearing participants.
For each type of segmentation, we calculated the
mean probability of this segmentation occurring by
chance (Chance Level entered along x axis of Figure
2). All segmentations occurring between two adjacent
letters were considered to be equally probable whatever
the position of the letters in the word. Subjects could
always perform syllabic segmentations twice for each
item and each item could be segmented at seven or
more places in total. Thus, the probability of a subject
segmenting the item syllabically is exactly 40 chances
out of 146 (146 is the total number of possible segmentations in the 20 items). The probability of subjects
performing a nonsyllabic segmentation was higher (106
chances in 146). In Figure 2, the chance level is represented by a score out of 20 points: 40/146 becomes
5.48; 106/146 becomes 14.56). A comparison test between the scores of participants and the scores expected by chance (bilateral Student’s t test) was computed.
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Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 4:2 Spring 1999
Hearing participants produced significantly more
syllabic segments than chance level (t(19) 5 6.73, p ,
.001) and fewer nonsyllabic segments than chance level
(t(19 ) 5 26.6, p , .001). (One hearing subject copied
all the items without segmentation. His scores are not
taken into account; n 5 20 and df 5 19.) Deaf participants also produced significantly more syllabic segments than chance level (t(20) 5 6.89, p , .001) and
fewer nonsyllabic segments than chance level (t(20) 5
26.41, p , .001). This indicates that the first segments
copied by hearing and deaf participants are more often
syllabic than nonsyllabic when compared to chance
level.
So far, however, the syllables in our material have
corresponded to phonological and orthographic units.
Indeed, in our material the bigrams frequency was
higher inside syllables (mean frequency 5 2,065) than
at syllable boundaries (mean frequency 5 488; Student’s for dependent samples, t(9) 5 4.34, p , .01).
The purpose of the next analysis was to test more directly the case in which the syllabic boundary is determined by phonology.
When Syllabic Boundaries Are Defined by
Phonology: nC Items and nV Items
This analysis concerns the comparison between the
segmentations made on the trisyllabic pseudo-words
nC (e.g., rentala) and nV (e.g., renalat). Hearing subjects should make more segmentations that respect syllabic boundaries, that is, between two syllables, than
nonsyllabic segmentations. Thus, they are expected to
make (1) more segmentations before “n” for nV than
for nC items (e.g., segmentation before “n” of renalat
(nV item) is syllabic; segmentation before “n ” of rentala (nC item) is nonsyllabic) and (2) more numerous
segmentations after “n” for nC items than for nV items
(e.g., segmentation after “n ” of renalat (nV item) is
nonsyllabic; segmentation after “n” of rentalat (nC item)
is syllabic).
Table 3 presents the mean number of items segmented before the “n,” the mean number of segmentations after the letter “n,” and the mean number of items
not segmented at those positions (items that are not
segmented at all and items that are segmented before
the letter preceding “n” and after the letter following
Table 3 Mean number (and standard deviation) of items
segmented before and after “n” and not segmented in either
condition as a function of the type of item (nC or nV) for
hearing and deaf participants
Before “n”
Hearing (n5 21)
Deaf (n5 21)
After “n”
Hearing
Deaf
Not segmented or
segmented elsewhere
Hearing
Deaf
nC items (5)
nV items (5)
Re/ntala
0.09
(0.3)
0.28
(0.56)
Ren/tala
2.43a
(1.57)a
2.38a
(1.56)a
Re/nalat
0.86a
(0.79)a
0.71a
(0.72)a
Ren/alat
1.33
(1.15)
2.24
(1.22)
2.48
(1.5)
2.33
(1.56)
2.81
(1.4)
2.05
(1.5)
Syllabic segmentations.
a
“n”). When subjects performed segmentations at V
and at V 1 1 for the same item (e.g., re/n/tala), the
two segmentations were taken into account, but such
occurrences were rare.
An ANOVA was carried out on the mean number
of nonsegmented items and on the mean number of
segmentations occurring before “n” and after “n.” For
each measure, data were analyzed with a 2 3 2 design
(Hearing status [Hearing vs. Deaf ] 3 Items [nC vs.
nV]) with repeated measures on the last factor. The
mean number of nonsegmented items did not vary significantly as a function of either Hearing status (F1(1,
40) 5 1.14, ns; F2(1, 8) 5 3.07, ns) or type of item
(F1(1, 40) , 1, ns; F2(1, 8) , 1, ns) and there was no
significant interaction (F1(1, 40) 5 2.93, ns; F2(1, 8) 5
1.44, ns). As there were no quantitative differences between the experimental and control groups, this enabled us to analyze the qualitative differences on the
segmentations occurring before and after the letter “n.”
Segmentations before “n.” As predicted, the mean number
of segmentations was higher for nV items than for nC
items (F1(1, 40) 5 25.93, p , .001; F2(1, 8) 5 5.78,
p , .05). Hearing status had no significant effect (F1
, 1; F2 , 1). The interaction between Hearing status
and Items did not reach a significant level (F1(1, 40) 5
Syllabic Units in Deaf Children’s Reading
137
Table 4 Numbers and percentages of errors made by deaf and hearing participants for all
items
Legal
errors
Deaf (n 5 21)
5
8.47%
Hearing (n 5 21) 33
43.42%
Lexical
Addition and Letter
confusions Transpositions omission
confusion All errors
3
5.08%
1
1.32%
11
18.64%
7
9.21%
21
35.60%
14
18.42%
2.03, ns; F2(1, 8) 5 4.9, ns). This suggests that subjects performed more syllabic segmentations for nV
items (“re” is the first syllable of “renalat”) than nonsyllabic segmentations for nC items (“re” is not the
first syllable of “rentala”). This dependent variable
seems to indicate that all the subjects performed segmentations that corresponded to the syllable unit.
However, segmentations before “n” were infrequent
for nV items and were close to zero for nC items in
both groups.
Segmentations after the “n.” As predicted, the number of
segmentations after the “n” was higher for nC items
than for nV items (F1(1, 40) 5 13.88, p , .001; F2
(1, 8) 5 6.23, p , .05). There was no significant effect
of Hearing status (F1(1, 40) 5 1.17, ns; F2(1, 8) 5
2.03, ns). The interaction between Hearing status and
Items was significant but only in the F1 analysis (F1(1,
40) 5 8.21, p , .01; F2(1, 8) 5 2.51, ns). Hearing
subjects performed more segmentations for nC than
for nV items; that is, they made more syllabic than
nonsyllabic segmentations. In contrast, deaf subjects
produced nearly the same number of segmentations for
nC and nV items (the difference was not significant in
a Newman-Keuls a posteriori test).
Analysis of Errors
The video recording of the copy enabled us to count all
misspellings as errors, even those immediately corrected by the subject. Several types of error were analyzed. We categorized the errors within a hierarchy.
First, “legal errors” were considered: the phonology of
the target is not disturbed, for example, “téléphonne”
instead of téléphone (/telefɔn/). Next, “lexical confusions” were counted: the subject wrote a word instead
of the item presented, for example, “mais” (“but”) in-
19
32.20%
21
27.63%
59
100%
76
100%
stead of main (“hand”). Transposition errors were considered next. These consisted of errors in the order of
the letters; for example, “ramssare” instead of ramasser
(“to gather up”). Omissions and additions of one letter
were then counted, for example, “aniaux” instead of
“animaux” (“animals”). Finally, we considered confusions of letters, that is, cases in which the subject substituted one letter for another, for example, “renatat”
instead of renalat (pseudo-word).
Because the errors were rare, the mean number of
errors is presented for Deaf and Hearing subjects in
Table 4, collapsed on words and pseudo-words, monosyllabic and trisyllabic items.
T tests for independent samples (Hearing, Deaf)
were performed on each type of error (except for the
rare lexical errors). The comparison between hearing
and deaf children was significant for legal errors
(t(40)53.44, p , .001) but not for lexical errors, transposition errors, addition and omission errors, or confusion of letters errors (all ps . .10).
Interindividual Differences
For deaf children, the mean score in the speech reception test was 25 points on the 38-point scale; on the
whole, scores were higher than the mean score (71% of
subjects had a score higher than the arithmetic mean
of 19). Their scores corresponded to a rather high level
of speech reception (lipreading and Cued Speech).
However, most of deaf children achieved only low
scores for speech intelligibility: only five subjects
achieved a score higher than 3, corresponding to intelligible speech; for others subjects, many words were
unintelligible (see Table 1 for details).
The correlations between lexical level, chronological age, speech reception level, hearing loss, and speech
intelligibility for the 21 deaf children have been com-
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Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 4:2 Spring 1999
puted. Speech intelligibility tended to be negatively
correlated with hearing loss, but this correlation did
not reach the conventional statistical level (r 5 .42, p 5
.06). Only the correlation between speech reception
score and speech intelligibility score reached a significant level: intelligibility increased with the speech reception score (r 5 .72, p , .001).
The correlation between chronological age and
lexical level was weak and nonsignificant for deaf participants (r 5 .33, ns) and did not reach the level of significance for hearing children (r 5 .43, ns).
No correlation was found between speech production and reception scores and experimental scores.
Thus, no more advanced statistical analysis could be
performed.
Discussion
This study aimed at investigating whether educated
deaf French children use the syllable as a unit during
the copying of written material. Severely and profoundly deaf children and younger hearing children
matched for lexical level were filmed while copying
monosyllabic and trisyllabic words and pseudo-words.
The copying duration, number of glances, the type of
the first segment copied, and the type of error were recorded. The number of glances and copy duration were
expected to vary depending on the nature of the written material. Our results confirmed these hypotheses.
The effects of lexicality and of length were highly significant. Copying duration and the number of segmentations were higher for long items than for short items
and higher for pseudo-words than for real words. This
last point confirms the Humblot et al. (1994) data. In
our study, these effects were almost identical for hearing and deaf children. This point enabled us to compare both groups in a more qualitative way.
Hearing children were expected to perform initial
segmentations that respect syllabic boundaries. This
prediction was confirmed. This finding supports results obtained with French hearing children (Humblot
et al., 1994; Rieben et al., 1989). The main question
was whether deaf children also processed syllabic segments. Our results show that deaf children do indeed
use syllabic units when they copy words and pseudowords. First segmentations occurring within the syl-
labic boundary were significantly above chance level.
The deaf children’s sensitivity to the syllabic nature of
the written items lead us to assume that they could
have converted the written material into a phonological
form corresponding to the syllable, as the hearing children did. Indeed, syllables are basic units of articulation. Thus, it is possible that deaf children might be
sensitive to the syllabic features of environmental oral
language (Campbell & Wright, 1990; Sterne, 1996).
This syllabic sensitivity could lead to the processing of
corresponding reading units during the task.
However, syllable boundaries are often flanked by
letter patterns with relatively low transition frequencies (Seidenberg, 1987). This was the case in our material where bigram frequencies were higher inside syllables than at syllabic boundaries. Therefore, the syllabic
segmentations performed by hearing and deaf children
could be explained to an extent by the use of orthographic information. In one particular case (nC and nV
items), orthographic and phonological factors were not
confounded. These items were orthographically very
similar, for example, rentala (nC item) and renalat (nV
item). An effect of the type of item on the first segmentations of the letter “n” was expected if subjects segment on the basis of the spoken syllabic structure.
Segmentations before the letter “n” (segmentations occurring after “re” in our example) were more
numerous for nV items (i.e., re/nalat, syllabic segmentations) than for nC items (i.e., re/ntala, nonsyllabic).
This was observed in deaf as well as in hearing participants. However, this result is not particularly convincing if considered in isolation. Indeed, segmentations of
nV items were not very numerous in absolute terms.
Moreover, nV items were more often segmented after
“n” (ren/alat, nonsyllabic) than before “n” (re/nalat,
syllabic). A posteriori, the low number of segmentations for nC items could be explained by a legality
effect. Indeed, when subjects segment nC items on V,
the following segment is illegal (i.e., impossible), both
orthographically and phonologically at the beginning
of a syllable (e.g., -ntala in the nC item rentala). In other
words, the fact that there are more segmentations before “n” on nV items (re/nala) than on nC items (re/
ntala) does not necessarily mean that children use the
syllabic unit of spoken language.
If we turn to the segmentations performed after
Syllabic Units in Deaf Children’s Reading
“n” (ren in our example), hearing subjects produced
more of these segmentations after “n” for nC items
(i.e., ren/tala, syllabic segmentations) than for nV
items (i.e., ren/alat, nonsyllabic). This suggests that
they were able to access the phonologically defined syllabic structure. Indeed, there is no orthographic effect
that can explain this result: when subjects performed
a segmentation after “n,” the following segments (for
example, ta for ren/tala in nC items and al for renala in
nV items) were always legal at the beginning of a syllable and their frequency was the same for nC items and
for nV items.
If we consider the results obtained using this measure, the hearing children were able to access the phonology of the items because they segmented the bigrams en, an, and on differently as a function of their
phonological correspondences, that is, as a function of
the phonological boundaries between syllables. Those
results are compatible with those in many other studies.
Since the syllable is a basic unit of articulation, it is
used as a processing unit in several paradigms: shortterm memorization (see a review of the studies presenting the links between number of syllables, articulation
characteristics, and short-term memory in Baddeley,
1990); reading aloud (Colé & Magnan, 1997) and copy
paradigms (see Humblot et al., 1994; Lambert &
Espéret, 1997; Rieben et al., 1991).
The results of error analyses for hearing children
are compatible with these findings: legal errors constituted the most frequent type of error made by hearing
children. This observation provides support for the hypothesis of an assembling strategy in reading and copying for normally-hearing children.
In contrast, the deaf subjects’ results did not reveal
any such phonological strategy. Indeed, the number of
segmentations after “n” was nearly the same for nC
and nV items. One interpretation is that the deaf children were reluctant to segment letter strings such as
“en,” “an,” or “on.” Instead, they acted as if they were
trying to “preserve” these units in contexts where such
letter strings take the form of digraphs (ren/tala), as
well as in contexts in which they do not (ren/ala). In
other words, the deaf children might not separate digrams that potentially correspond to one phoneme.
This tendency might result from an explicit knowledge
of digraphs. Indeed, when learning to read and to spell,
139
the children in our population are taught that “en,”
“an,” or “on” are graphemic units that correspond to
only one “sound,” which is expressed by precise representations in Cued Speech (/ã/, /ã/ and /õ/). This
tendency not to segment potential digrams might also
result from visuo-orthographic phenomena: the sequence V 1 “n” is a more frequent digram than the
sequences “nC” and “nV” (for details, see the description of the material). Since the deaf children in our
sample had been exposed to written language for several years, the learning of orthographic regularities
might have occurred, at least in an implicit manner.
This interpretation is compatible with Gibson et al.’s
(1970) and Hanson’s results (1986), which show that
deaf readers are sensitive to orthographic redundancy.
The analysis of the errors provided no evidence in
favor of phonological processes in reading by deaf children. On the contrary, the deaf children’s errors violated the phonology of the items almost systematically.
The main question is to discover the reason why no
evidence for the conversion of written items into phonological units was provided by the deaf participants.
In the speech perception test, the deaf participants
were obliged to discriminate between items sharing the
same labial image and to perform a phonological conversion of speech into spelling. Why did they not do
the opposite and convert written material into its phonological form in the copy task? Two nonmutually exclusive hypotheses can be proposed in order to explain
our results: first, nC and nV items might have been too
difficult to decode; second, the results may be due to
the lack of automatization of deaf children’s assembling abilities.
The first hypothesis is that deaf children would not
be able to perform the precise phonological processing
necessary to be sensitive to the nC and nV items. It is
highly possible that deaf children might not be sensitive to subtleties of grapho-phonological decoding such
as the fact that a digraph can be a phoneme in some
cases and two phonemes in other cases. Deaf participants may have benefited from the Cued Speech technique, and possibly it has improved their phonological
representations as shown by the results of the speech
reception test. However, their phonological representations did not reach the same level of precision as those
of hearing children or of deaf children who have been
140
Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 4:2 Spring 1999
intensively exposed to Cued Speech from an early age
(for a review, see LaSasso & Metzger, 1998; Leybaert
et al. 1998).
According to the second hypothesis, deaf children
do not perform a grapho-phonological conversion because the cognitive cost of this process is too high. Seen
from this viewpoint, the deaf children were able to perform grapho-phonological conversion, but it was not
automatic for them. It required a cognitive effort. Orthographic units were more easily and more rapidly
processed by the deaf children in our sample than the
corresponding phonological units. In contrast, the
hearing children probably activated the phonological
form of items automatically or more rapidly in order to
maintain them in memory, and this phonological storage led to their use of phonological copying units.
These results can be discussed in the light of Leybaert
et al.’s studies (1983). Their results revealed an automatic activation of phonological representations of
color nouns in a Stroop experiment by deaf children.
Deaf children are probably able to process phonological representations of short and very familiar items automatically. However, they encounter more difficulty
when the items are long and unknown.
In both cases, we concluded that our results failed
to indicate that the type of coding used by deaf children in order to read and remember experimental material was of a phonological nature at least for the nV
and nC items. Nevertheless, the deaf children’s results
provided evidence in favor of reading units that respect
orthographic redundancy. Incidental observations of
the deaf participants’ behavior during the task enabled
us to explore this possibility more thoroughly.
Whereas a great number of hearing subjects made
subvocalizations during the experimental tasks, many
of the deaf participants made fingerspelling movements (some deaf children sometimes produced the
sign of the word in FSL, but only very few made vocalizations and none of them used Cued Speech). This
observation raises certain questions concerning fingerspelling: it is possible that children use fingerspelling when they have to store written material before
copying it. Indeed, several authors have found that
fingerspelling improves the memorization of word lists
(Hirsh-Pasek, 1987) or letter lists (Hanson et al., 1984;
Locke & Locke, 1971) in native deaf signers.
In this case, there could be a link between the units
the child processes while making his fingerspelling
movements and the units used in copying. Indeed, fingerspelling is used by deaf people as if they were using
units, and sublexical units emerge as if they were forming clusters of letters (Hanson, 1982; Hirsh-Pasek,
1987). At present, we do not know the nature of these
fingerspelling units either in English or in French.
However, our observations raise new questions. Do
fingerspelling units correspond to orthographic redundancy, to morphemes, or to the phonological units involved in articulation? Our observations would tend to
support the hypothesis that fingerspelling units correspond to orthographic redundancy, but further research will help to solve this problem.
Appendix
Experimental Items
Monosyllabic items
Words
Beau /bo/ beautiful
Juin /Zyε̃/ June
Lion /ljõ/ lion
Main /mε̃/ hand
Peau /po/ skin
Ciel /sjεl/ sky
Cour /kur/ yard
Jour /Zur/ day
Neuf /nûf/ new
Voir /vwar/ to see
Pseudo-words
cuin /kyε̃/
jain /Zε̃/
jeau /Zo/
neau /no/
vion /vjõ/
bour /bur/
coir /kwar/
leuf /lûf/
peuf /pûf/
viel /vjεl/
Trisyllabic items
Words
animaux /animo/ animals
éléphant /elefã/ elephant
champignon /ʃãpi®õ/ mushroom
chocolat /ʃɔkɔla/ chocolate
pantalon /pãtalõ/ trousers
papillon /papijõ/ butterfly
ramasser /ramase/ to gather up
regarder /rûgarde/ to look at
téléphone /telefɔn/ telephone
confiture /kõfityr/ jam
Syllabic Units in Deaf Children’s Reading
Pseudo-words
apiphant /apifã/
énillon /enijõ/
pafimaux /pafimo/
rapilon /rapilõ/
técosser /tekose/
nC items
conléder /kõlede/
rentala /rãtala/
phongarcho /fõgarʃo/
panlégnone /pãle®ɔn/
chantature /ʃãtatyr/
nV items
conélder /konelde/
renalat /rûnala/
phonarcho /fonarʃo/
panégnone /pane®ɔn/
chanature /ʃanatyr/
141
6. Whatever precautions we took in the choice of the experimental sample of participants, the deaf population’s cognitive
processes will necessarily be more heterogeneous than that of the
hearing population. Thus, variability across subjects is important. We had to control whether effects that are significant with
subjects as fixed factor (F2) are also significant with subjects as
random factor (F1): if F2 is significant but not F1, we conclude
that the effect exists but cannot be extended to the whole population (population of deaf children who share the same characteristics as our sample); conversely, because of the difficulty of working with linguistic stimuli, we need to control whether effects are
significant when items are the random factor (F2) and not only
when they are a fixed factor (F1). If the levels of significance are
elevated both for F1 and F2, we can consider that our result can
be extended to the population and to items that share the same
characteristics as those in our experiment.
Notes
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