Chinese deaf adolescents' free recall of taxonomic, slot-filler, and thematic categories.
Four experiments were conducted to show that deaf adolescents tended to process information in different ways from hearing adolescents. Memorizing items sequentially shown on computer screens under the control of their articulators' movements, deaf adolescents tended to treat items that cohered as taxonomic, thematic, or slot-filler categories as isolated pieces of information. Having to perceive information by means of sign language, however, their achievements were not worse than those of hearing adolescents anymore, no matter whether the stimuli were presented as words or pictures. They could not only utilize categories relations to help memorize categories exemplars but were relatively better aware of slot-filler or thematic than taxonomic relations as well, suggesting that they had a relatively delayed development of taxonomic category representations in comparison with hearing adolescents.
Li
Degao
D
School of International Studies, Zhejiang University, China.
Zhang
Jijia
J
D000293:Adolescent; D001288:Attention; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002681:China; D003210:Concept Formation; D003638:Deafness / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006225:Hand; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D016555:Matched-Pair Analysis; D011939:Mental Recall; D009055:Mouth; D009068:Movement; D012660:Semantics; D012813:Sign Language; D014706:Verbal Learning