- 學位論文
The phonological mediation hypothesis evidence from Chinese students with hearing impairment
The phonological mediation hypothesis evidence from Chinese students with hearing impairment
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並列摘要
In Western countries, there are around 8-10% of school age children suffering from mild to moderate reading difficulties. Similarly, in Hong Kong the prevalence of reading difficulties among school age children was found to be 9.7- 12%. An understanding of the mechanisms involved in reading helps us to determine the skills necessary for successful reading. The Phonological Mediation Hypothesis (PMH), which claims that phonological recoding is a necessary phase during lexical access, is widely known for its postulation that phonological awareness would be a significant prognostic indicator of reading development. Theoretically, individuals who have difficulties in phonological recoding during lexical access should also encounter reading difficulties. Good readers with hearing impairment are, therefore, considered as counter examples of PMH. If the above prediction of PHM is true, skilled readers with hearing impairment should have the ability to develop an intact phonological representation and hence are more capable of phonological recoding. In this study, the reading behaviors of children with hearing impairment (HI), that of their reading level matched (RL) and that of their chronological age matched (CA) controls were compared in three tasks—an auditory perceptual task of onset rime awareness (TAPOR); a synonym decision task (SDT); and a homophone decision task (HDT). The results for TAPOR showed that auditory perceptual ability (APOR) accounted for 49% of the variance in the reading ability of children with hearing impairment. In addition, results of cross group comparisons on the scores in TAPOR demonstrated a possible causal relationship between APOR and reading ability in subjects with hearing impairment. On the other hand, SDT and HDT results indicated a significant preference for orthographic foils in RL and HI subjects with low reading ability. An increasing tendency to choose synonyms or homophones, and a decreasing tendency to use orthographic distractors was observed across subject groups with Primary 1, Primary 2 and Primary 6 reading abilities. A similar but delayed pattern of change in preference for distractors was observed in HI subjects. The results only partially agree with PMH. An alternative hypothesis—the Psycholinguistic Grain Size Theory (PGST) — might be a better model to explain the observed results. With reference to the results of TAPOR, the correlation between reading ability and auditory perceptual ability could be explained in terms of the ‘availability problem’ postulated in this latter model. In the same way, the early emergence of orthographic effect in almost all subjects except CA controls and the late emergence of a number of reading strategies operating at different levels of grain size can be better explained by ‘consistency problems’ and ‘granularity problems’ proposed in PGST. These findings are considered, and directions for further studies are outlined.