{"id":2320,"date":"2015-12-09T19:37:50","date_gmt":"2015-12-10T00:37:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/?p=2320"},"modified":"2015-12-28T22:30:05","modified_gmt":"2015-12-29T03:30:05","slug":"deaf-individuals-read-more-efficiently","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/2015\/12\/09\/deaf-individuals-read-more-efficiently\/","title":{"rendered":"Deaf Individuals Read More Efficiently"},"content":{"rendered":"

Have you ever wondered if when one sensory module is impaired, other sensory systems learn to develop other means to counteract that deficiency? Past studies have shown that deaf individuals have a larger capability to focus on simple visual stimuli in the parafovea. The parafovea is a region in the eye that surrounds your fovea, the central pit of the eye that is responsible for sharp, central vision. Large rates of \"Macula_lutea.svg\"<\/a>illiteracy in the deaf population have caused people to question whether deaf individuals wide range of focus in the parafovea, causes reduced processing in the fovea. A recent study done at the University of California San Diego has shown that deaf people\u2019s parafoveal vision does not cause reduced vision on the fovea and they actually have a wider range of sharp vision which researchers found and can actually aid them in complex visual tasks such as reading (B\u00e9langer et al. 2012<\/a>).<\/p>\n

This study is titled,\u00a0Skilled Deaf Readers Have an Enhanced Perceptual Span in Reading.<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>A perceptual span refers to the area in which the human eye can seeclearly enough to read text. The researchers in this experiment were testing to see what the width of deaf readers was in comparison to hearing readers. The procedure the researchers used was relatively simple. First they selected sixty participants, forty from San Diego\u2019s deaf community ranging from ages 20 to 45 years old and twenty skilled readers from ages 21 to 43 who were able to hear and spoke English as their native language. All of the participants in the study had normal vision and first completed a test that assessed their reading level. The deaf readers were then split into two groups, one of skilled deaf readers and one of less-skilled deaf readers. After splitting the participants into groups, the researchers created 165 simple sentences that were each 10 to 17 words and would be presented on a single line to the participants. The eye movement of each participant was tested using a monitoring device and head movements were minimized using a chin and headrest<\/p>\n

\"eyetracking\"<\/a>
\nThe participants were given instructions to read each sentence and press a button when they were finished. They then participated in a short series of steps to calibrate the eye-tracking device. Next, each participant was given 15 practice sentences so they were able to understand how the moving window worked. After the practice they were given all test sentences one at a time. The researchers calculated the reading rate of the readers using words per minute (wpm) and found that when the window size increased, the reading rate for both skilled deaf readers and less-skilled deaf readers also increased while skilled hearing readers had no increase in reading rate with larger window sizes.The researchers used four different window sizes in their design method along with a baseline no-window condition where the entire sentence was visible. The four different window sizes all showed 4 visible characters to the left of focus point and either 6, 10, 14, or 18 character spaces on the right of the focus point. In the moving window conditions, the characters outside the window were replaced with an \u201cx\u201d, and as the window continued to move along the sentence, new characters were revealed and previous characters were again replaced with the \u201cx\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/p>\n

These results show that skilled deaf readers were the most negatively affected by the loss of information further down the line of text which means they are much more efficient readers with a large window and when they are given a smaller window (less words available at once), they don\u2019t read as efficiently. These skilled deaf readers have a wider range of sharp vision because they have good vision in their fovea, as well as sharpened vision in their parafovea. With this wider range of vision, these skilled deaf readers can take in more words per minute while reading than skilled hearing readers, disproving the previous suggestion that their sharp parafoveal vision causes deficits in other parts of their eye. This study also showed that both skilled deaf readers and less skilled deaf readers had a wider range of vision than skilled hearing readers, and the difference in their reading level\u00a0is caused by other factors. This study is\u00a0extremely important in the discussion surrounding illiteracy in the deaf population. As we discussed in class, our sensory memory system only has a certain storage capacity. These deaf individuals that show a larger visual sensory modality than hearing individuals may be able to give us information surrounding the limitations of our sensory systems and how capacity in sensory memory systems could possibly shift. For example if an individual is deaf, could it free up additional space in the sensory memory for functioning senses?<\/p>\n

Check out my peers article on parafoveal recognition while reading here<\/a><\/p>\n

References:<\/p>\n

Belanger, N. N., Slattery, T. J., Mayberry, R. I., & Rayner, K. (2012). Skilled\u00a0Deaf Readers Have an Enhanced Perceptual Span.\u00a0Psychological Science<\/em>,\u00a023<\/em>(7), 816-823.<\/p>\n

B\u00e9langer N. N., Baum S. R., Mayberry R. I. (2012). Reading difficulties in adult deaf readers of French: Phonological codes, not guilty! Scientific Studies of Reading, 16, 263\u2013285.<\/p>\n

Image 1:\u00a0https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Macula_of_retina<\/a><\/p>\n

Image 2: http:\/\/newsletter.blogs.wesleyan.edu\/2010\/01\/19\/eye-tracking-study-reveals-how-people-make-decisions\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Image 3:\u00a0http:\/\/pss.sagepub.com\/content\/23\/7\/816.full<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Have you ever wondered if when one sensory module is impaired, other sensory systems learn to develop other means to counteract that deficiency? Past studies have shown that deaf individuals have a larger capability to focus on simple visual stimuli in the parafovea. The parafovea is a region in the eye that surrounds your fovea, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7441,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80218],"tags":[12419,272,130408],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2320"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7441"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2320"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2320\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2401,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2320\/revisions\/2401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}