Målgruppe for seminaret
Forskere, studenter, audiopedagoger, logopeder, spesialpedagoger, og lærere som jobber med barn og unge som har hørselstap.
Seminaret holdes på engelsk.
Welcome to this seminar where visiting scholar Associate Professor Inma Fajardo, University of Valencia, will present her research.
Abstract
Previous research has widely shown the low reading achievement exhibited by students with a prelingual severe-to-profound deafness (here and after referred to as Deaf or Hard of Hearing, DHH) compared to their typically hearing (TH) peers (e.g., Conrad, 1979; Geers, Tobey, Moog & Brenner, 2008; Harris & Terlektsi, 2011; Moreno-Pérez, Saldaña, & Rodríguez-Ortiz, 2015; Qi & Mitchel, 2012; Traxler, 2000). Most of those former studies have used standardized tests or output measures to assess reading proficiency so they look at the product of reading rather than the process. Examining the process of reading in DHH students may help to identify exactly where and when reading comprehension breaks down, providing a better understanding of what might be the best focus of reading intervention practices.
The general goal of our research line was to fill in this gap by exploring DHH students' reading behaviour with a focus on the process by means of eye-movements’ measurement. With that aim, 20 students with a pre-lingual and bilateral severe-to-profound hearing loss (aged 9–15 years) and 20 non-verbal IQ and chronologically age-matched TH students participated in a series of experimental tasks in which their grammatical comprehension abilities at the single sentence level (Study 1 and Study 2) and their reading comprehension skills at the text level (Study 3) were assessed.
Both offline accuracy measures and online (eye movements) measures were obtained in the three studies. All DHH students were users of prosthetic devices (hearing aids or cochlear implants), were orally educated and used spoken language as their preferred means of communication. Throughout the three studies, additional exploratory analyses were conducted in order to analyse the association between the individual factors (mainly language related) underpinning the reading ability of both TH and DHH readers on the one hand, and accuracy and eye-movement patterns during reading, on the other.
Study 1 showed that DHH students were less accurate than TH students when detecting grammatical incongruences in simple sentences. Although both groups were sensitive to grammatical incongruences (more time and more fixations at the target in incongruent than congruent sentences), DHH students made more but shorter fixations in the target area than their TH peers. Syntactic skills appeared to be consistently related to reading time at the incongruent sentences (higher syntactic skills – lower reading time).
Study 2 showed that DHH students were levelled to TH students when reading simple sentences but underperformed them on complex sentences. In addition, results confirmed that DHH students were sensitive to syntactic cues when comprehending sentences, although they made longer and more fixations in lexical distractors than TH students.
Finally, Study 3 revealed that TH students outperformed DHH students in the comprehension of a narrative text but obtained similar results in the expository one. Only for DHH participants the higher their vocabulary, written syntax, expressive language skills and the reading span, the higher the comprehension accuracy of the expository (but not narrative) texts. With regard to eye-movements, DHH students showed a larger saccade amplitude in the expository than in the narrative text which was interpreted as a deficit in monitoring text difficulty. Finally, Study 3 showed that DHH students fixated longer content words than TH students, there were no group differences for function words across texts, these results seem to support a preference for using content words to comprehend a text in DHH students.
We discuss our results with regard to the top-down preference hypothesis (Miller, 2000; Domínguez et al., 2016) which states that DHH readers will tend to ignore or misprocess syntactic cues and focus on lexical-semantic cues to infer the meaning of sentences/texts.
Inma Fajardo’s bio
Inmaculada Fajardo is Associate Professor at the Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology at the University of Valencia. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Neurodevelopmental Disorders and Disabilities, and conducts research in the Reading Research Unit/ERI Lectura leading the “Atypical” research group. Her interest is focused on the study of oral and written language development and optimization in people with neurodiversity, such as deafness, intellectual disability and autism. For this purpose, she employs non-invasive eye-tracking methodologies and multiple data analysis strategies. Main publications in personal website.