English 中文网 漫画网 爱新闻iNews 翻译论坛
中国网站品牌栏目(频道)
当前位置: Language Tips > Special Speed News VOA慢速

A new reason for why the deaf may have trouble reading

[ 2011-04-13 13:15]     字号 [] [] []  
免费订阅30天China Daily双语新闻手机报:移动用户编辑短信CD至106580009009

A new reason for why the deaf may have trouble reading

This is the VOA Special English Health Report.

Deaf people may have no trouble communicating English words through American Sign Language, or ASL. But studies of ASL users show that, on average, educated deaf adults are likely to read at the level of a nine-year-old.

The explanation has always been that this is because they never learned to connect letters with sounds. But a recent study shows that deaf readers are just like other people learning to read in a second language. Linguist Jill Morford led the study.

JILL MORFORD: "The assumption has always been that the problems with reading were educational issues with what's the right way to teach reading when you can't associate sounds with letters. But what we're finding is that all this time we've been ignoring the fact that they're actually learning a new language."

Ms. Morford is a professor at the University of New Mexico and part of a research center at Gallaudet University in Washington. Most students at Gallaudet are deaf; the center studies how deaf people learn and use language.

Professor Morford says signers are like English learners whose first language uses a different alphabet.

JILL MORFORD: "Anyone who has a first language that has a written system that's very different than English, like Arabic or Chinese or Russian, knows that learning to recognize and understand words in English is much more challenging than if you already speak a language that uses the same orthography."

The orthography is the written system and spelling of a language. Of course, with signers, their first language has no written system at all, just hand gestures. Gallaudet professor Tom Allen explains what effect this has on reading.

TOM ALLEN: "We're not dealing with representations in the brain which are primarily auditory. You know, people when they read, they kind of hear -- there's a silent hearing going on when you read a word, when a hearing person reads a word. When a deaf person reads a word, there's not. They see the word and there's some kind of an orthographic representation. And some of the research in our center has shown that when deaf readers read an English word, it activates their sign representations of those words."

Signers can face the same problems as other bilingual people. Their brains have to choose between two languages all the time. Take the words "paper" and "movie." Their spelling and meaning are not at all similar. But, as Professor Allen points out, the signs for them are.

TOM ALLEN: "The sign for paper, you hold one hand flat and you just lightly tap it with a flat palm on the other hand, and you do that a couple times and that means paper. Now, movie is, like, very similar. One of the hands keeps a flat hand shape and it just kind of lightly moves back and forth as if it were a flickering image on a screen."

The study is in the journal Cognition.

And that's the VOA Special English Health Report, written by Kelly Nuxoll. To learn about other research on bilingualism, go to voaspecialenglish.com. And you can find captioned videos of our reports on the VOA Learning English channel on YouTube. I'm Steve Ember.

orthography: the system of spelling in a language(文字的)拼写体系,拼写法

Related stories:

Inside the complex worlds of deaf culture

Deaf-Blind Awareness Week

Are people who speak more than one language smarter?

研究:语言的转换可能带来个性转变

(来源:VOA 编辑:崔旭燕)

 
中国日报网英语点津版权说明:凡注明来源为“中国日报网英语点津:XXX(署名)”的原创作品,除与中国日报网签署英语点津内容授权协议的网站外,其他任何网站或单位未经允许不得非法盗链、转载和使用,违者必究。如需使用,请与010-84883631联系;凡本网注明“来源:XXX(非英语点津)”的作品,均转载自其它媒体,目的在于传播更多信息,其他媒体如需转载,请与稿件来源方联系,如产生任何问题与本网无关;本网所发布的歌曲、电影片段,版权归原作者所有,仅供学习与研究,如果侵权,请提供版权证明,以便尽快删除。
 

关注和订阅

人气排行

翻译服务

中国日报网翻译工作室

我们提供:媒体、文化、财经法律等专业领域的中英互译服务
电话:010-84883468
邮件:translate@chinadaily.com.cn