Deafness enhances perceptual span size in Chinese reading: Evidence from a gaze-contingent moving-window paradigm

The Chinese lexicon of deaf readers: A database of character decisions and a comparison between deaf and hearing readers

We present a psycholinguistic study investigating lexical effects on simplified Chinese character recognition by deaf readers. Prior research suggests that deaf readers exhibit efficient orthographic processing and decreased reliance on speech-based phonology in word recognition compared to hearing readers. In this large-scale character decision study (25 participants, each evaluating 2500 real characters and 2500 pseudo-characters), we analyzed various factors influencing character recognition accuracy and speed in deaf readers. Deaf participants demonstrated greater accuracy and faster recognition when characters were more frequent, were acquired earlier, had more strokes, displayed higher orthographic complexity, were more imageable in reference, or were less concrete in reference. Comparison with a previous study of hearing readers revealed that the facilitative effect of frequency on character decision accuracy was stronger for deaf readers than hearing readers. The effect of orthographic-phonological regularity differed significantly for the two groups, indicating that deaf readers rely more on orthographic structure and less on phonological information during character recognition. Notably, increased stroke counts (i.e., higher orthographic complexity) hindered hearing readers but facilitated recognition processes in deaf readers, suggesting that deaf readers excel at recognizing characters based on orthographic structure. The database generated from this large-scale character decision study offers a valuable resource for further research and practical applications in deaf education and literacy.

Deaf readers use leftward information to read more efficiently: Evidence from eye tracking

Little is known about how information to the left of fixation impacts reading and how it may help to integrate what has been read into the context of the sentence. To better understand the role of this leftward information and how it may be beneficial during reading, we compared the sizes of the leftward span for reading-matched deaf signers (n = 32) and hearing adults (n = 40) using a gaze-contingent moving window paradigm with windows of 1, 4, 7, 10, and 13 characters to the left, as well as a no-window condition. All deaf participants were prelingually and profoundly deaf, used American Sign Language (ASL) as a primary means of communication, and were exposed to ASL before age eight. Analysis of reading rates indicated that deaf readers had a leftward span of 10 characters, compared to four characters for hearing readers, and the size of the span was positively related to reading comprehension ability for deaf but not hearing readers. These findings suggest that deaf readers may engage in continued word processing of information obtained to the left of fixation, making reading more efficient, and showing a qualitatively different reading process than hearing readers.