By Samuel J. Supalla
Citation
McQuarrie, L., & Parrila, R. (2009). Phonological representations in deaf children: Rethinking the
“functional equivalence” hypothesis. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 14(2), 137-
154.
Abstract
The sources of knowledge that individuals use to make similarity judgments between words are
thought to tap underlying phonological representations. We examined the effects of perceptual
similarity between stimuli on deaf children's ability to make judgments about the phonological
similarity between words at 3 levels of linguistic structure (syllable, rhyme, and phoneme).
Manipulation of stimulus contrasts (acoustic, visual/orthographic tactile/motoric) allowed a finer-
grained estimate of the sources of knowledge of deaf individuals use to make judgments between
words. The results showed that the ability to make syllabic-, rhyme-, and phoneme-level judgments
was not tied to "phonological" facilitation when these conditions are contrasted. These findings are
inconsistent with long-held assumptions of "functional" equivalence between "heard" and "seen"
speech in the development of phonological representations in deaf learners. We argue that previous
studies reporting evidence for phonological effects in similarity judgments have failed to sufficiently
control for alternative sources of sensory information, namely, visual and tactile/motoric.
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(5 ¾ minutes long)
The Power of ASL
12
Winter 2019 – Issue 16