Recently, Bélanger, Slattery, Mayberry and Rayner showed, using the moving-window paradigm, that profoundly deaf adults have a wider perceptual span during reading relative to hearing adults matched on reading level. This difference might be related to the fact that deaf adults allocate more visual attention to simple stimuli in the parafovea. Importantly, this reorganization of visual attention in deaf individuals is already manifesting in deaf children. This leads to questions about the time course of the emergence of an enhanced perceptual span (which is under attentional control) in young deaf readers. The present research addressed this question by comparing the perceptual spans of young deaf readers (age 7-15) and young hearing readers (age 7-15). Young deaf readers, like deaf adults, were found to have a wider perceptual span relative to their hearing peers matched on reading level, suggesting that strong and early reorganization of visual attention in deaf individuals goes beyond the processing of simple visual stimuli and emerges into more cognitively complex tasks, such as reading.
AllenT. (1986). A study of the achievement patterns of hearing-impaired students: 1974-1983. In SchildrothA. N.KarchmerM. A. (Eds.), Deaf children in America (pp. 161–206). San Diego, CA: College-Hill.
2.
BaayenR. H.DavidsonD. H.BatesD. M. (2008). Mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and items. Journal of Memory and Language, 59, 390–412.
3.
BatesD.MaechlerM.BolkerB.WalkerS. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1–48.
4.
BavelierD.BrozinskyC.TomannA.MitchellT.NevilleH.LiuG. (2001). Impact of early deafness and early exposure to sign language on the cerebral organization for motion processing. Journal of Neuroscience, 21, 8931–8942.
5.
BavelierD.DyeM. W. G.HauserP. C. (2006). Do deaf individuals see better?Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 512–518.
6.
BélangerN.N.RaynerK. (2013). Frequency and predictability effects in eye fixations for skilled and less-skilled deaf readers. Visual Cognition, 21, 477–497.
7.
BélangerN. N.BaumS. R.MayberryR. I. (2012). Reading difficulties in adult deaf readers of French: Phonological codes, not guilty!Scientific Studies of Reading, 16, 263–285.
8.
BélangerN. N.MayberryR. I.RaynerK. (2013). Orthographic and phonological preview benefits: Parafoveal processing in skilled and less-skilled deaf readers. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 66, 2237–2252.
9.
BélangerN. N.RaynerK. (2015). What eye movements reveal about deaf readers. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24, 220–226.
10.
BélangerN. N.SlatteryT. J.MayberryR. I.RaynerK. (2012). Skilled deaf readers have an enhanced perceptual span in reading. Psychological Science, 23, 816–823.
11.
BlytheH. I. (2014). Developmental changes in eye movements and visual information encoding associated with learning to read. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23, 201–207.
12.
BlytheH. I.LiversedgeS. P.JosephH. S. S. L.WhiteS. J.RaynerK. (2009). Visual information capture during fixations in reading for children and adults. Vision Research, 49, 1583–1591.
13.
BosworthR. G.DobkinsK. R. (2002). The effect of spatial attention on motion processing in deaf signers, hearing signers, and hearing non-signers. Brain and Cognition, 4, 152–169.
14.
BottariD.CaclinA.GiardM.-H.PavaniF. (2011). Changes in early cortical visual processing predict enhanced reactivity in deaf individuals. PLoS ONE, 6(9), e25607.
CobbT.RoessinghH. (2008, April). Vocabprofile for kids. Paper presented at the 42nd Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) Convention, New York, NY.
17.
CrippsJ. H.McBrideK. A.ForsterK. I. (2005). Lexical processing with deaf and hearing: Phonology and orthographic masked priming. In Arizona working papers in second language acquisition and teaching (Vol. 12, pp. 31–44). Tucson: University of Arizona.
18.
DaigleD.ArmandF. (2008). Phonological sensitivity in severely and profoundly deaf readers of French. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 21, 699–717.
19.
DyeM. W. G.HauserP. C.BavelierD. (2009). Is visual attention in deaf individuals enhanced or deficient? The case of the useful field of view. PLoS ONE, 4(5), e5640.
20.
EmmoreyK. (2002). Language, cognition, and the brain: Insights from sign language research. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
21.
EmmoreyK.McCulloughS.WeisbergJ. (2016). The neural underpinnings of reading skill in deaf adults. Brain and Language, 160, 11–20.
22.
HäikiöT.BertramR.HyönäJ.NiemiP. (2009). Development of the letter identity span in reading: Evidence from the eye movement moving window paradigm. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 102, 167–181.
23.
HansonV.FowlerC. (1987). Phonological coding in word reading: Evidence from hearing and deaf readers. Memory & Cognition, 15, 199–207.
24.
HirshornE. A.DyeM. W. G.HauserP.SupallaT. R.BavelierD. (2015). The contribution of phonological knowledge, memory, and language background to reading comprehension in deaf populations. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1153.
25.
JosephH. S. S. L.LiversedgeS. P.BlytheH. I.WhiteS. J.GathercoleS. E.RaynerK. (2009). Children’s and adults’ processing of anomaly and implausibility during reading: Evidence from eye movements. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 61, 708–723.
26.
KellyL.Barac-CikojaD. (2007). The comprehension of skilled deaf readers: The roles of word recognition and other potentially critical aspects of competence. In CainK.OakhillJ. (Eds.), Children’s comprehension problems in oral and written language: A cognitive perspective (pp. 244–279). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
27.
KuntzeM.GolosD.EnnsC. (2014). Rethinking literacy: Broadening opportunities for visual learners. Sign Language Studies, 14, 203–224.
28.
LoS.AndrewsS. (2015). To transform or not to transform: Using generalized linear mixed models to analyze reaction time data. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1171. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01171
29.
MarkwardtF. C. (1989). Manual. In Peabody Individual Achievement Test-Revised. Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Service.
30.
McConkieG. W.RaynerK. (1975). The span of the effective stimulus during a fixation in reading. Perception & Psychophysics, 17, 578–586.
31.
MielletS.O’DonnellP. J.SerenoS. C. (2009). Parafoveal magnification: Visual acuity does not modulate the perceptual span in reading. Psychological Science, 20, 721–728.
32.
PerfettiC. A.SandakR. (2000). Reading optimally builds on spoken language: Implications for deaf readers. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 5, 32–50.
33.
ProkschJ.BavelierD. (2002). Changes in the spatial distribution of visual attention after early deafness. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14, 687–701.
34.
QiS.MitchellR. E. (2012). Large-scale academic achievement testing of deaf and hard-of hearing students: Past, present, and future. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 17, 1–18.
35.
QuigleyS.WilburR.PowerD.MontanelliD.SteinkampM. (1976). Syntactic structure in the language of deaf children. Urbana: University of Illinois, Institute for Child Behavior and Development.
36.
RaynerK. (1986). Eye movements and the perceptual span in beginning and skilled readers. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 41, 211–236.
37.
RaynerK. (1998). Eye movements in reading and information processing: Twenty years of research. Psychological Bulletin, 124, 372–422.
38.
RaynerK. (2014). The gaze-contingent moving window in reading: Development and review. Visual Cognition, 22, 242–258.
39.
RaynerK.BerteraJ. H. (1979). Reading without a fovea. Science, 206, 468–469.
40.
RaynerK.SlatteryT. J.BélangerN. N. (2010). Eye movements, the perceptual span, and reading speed. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 17, 834–839.
41.
R Development Core Team. (2016). R: A language and environment for statistical computing [Computer software]. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.
42.
SperlichA.MeixnerJ.LaubrochJ. (2016). Development of the perceptual span in reading: A longitudinal study. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 146, 181–201.
43.
StracuzziD.KinseyJ. (2006). EyeTrack (Version 0.7.10h) [Computer software]. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Retrieved from www.psych.umass.edu/eyelab/software/
44.
TranslerC.LeybaertJ.GombertJ. E. (1999). Do deaf children use phonological syllables as reading units?Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 4, 124–143.
45.
VenablesW. N.RipleyB. D. (2002). Modern applied statistics with S (4th ed.). New York, NY: Springer.
46.
WatersG.DoehringD. (1990). Reading acquisition in congenitally deaf children who communicate orally: Insights from an analysis of component reading, language, and memory skills. In CarrT. H.LevyB. A. (Eds.), Reading and its development: Component skills approaches (pp. 323–373). New York, NY: Academic Press.
47.
WechslerD. (2011). Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence—Second Edition (WASI-II). San Antonio, TX: NCS Pearson.
