Recall of order information by deaf signers: phonetic coding in temporal order recall.

To examine the claim that phonetic coding plays a special role in temporal order recall, deaf and hearing college students were tested on their recall of temporal and spatial order information at two delay intervals. The deaf subjects were all native signers of American Sign Language. The results indicated that both the deaf and hearing subjects used phonetic coding in short-term temporal recall, and visual coding in spatial recall. There was no evidence of manual or visual coding among either the hearing or the deaf subjects in the temporal order recall task. The use of phonetic coding for temporal recall is consistent with the hypothesis that recall of temporal order information is facilitated by a phonetic code.

Short-term memory coding by deaf signers: the primary language coding hypothesis reconsidered.

Shand (Cognitive Psychology, 1982, 14, 1-12) hypothesized that strong reliance on a phonetic code by hearing individuals in short-term memory situations reflects their primary language experience. As support for this proposal, Shand reported an experiment in which deaf signers' recall of lists of printed English words was poorer when the American Sign Language translations of those words were structurally similar than when they were structurally unrelated. He interpreted this result as evidence that the deaf subjects were recoding the printed words into sign, reflecting their primary language experience. This primary language interpretation is challenged in the present article first by an experiment in which a group of hearing subjects showed a similar recall pattern on Shand's lists of words, and second by a review of the literature on short-term memory studies with deaf subjects. The literature survey reveals that whether or not deaf signers recode into sign depends on a variety of task and subject factors, and that, contrary to the primary language hypothesis, deaf signers may recode into a phonetic code in short-term recall.

Interactive video for bilingual ASL/English instruction of deaf children.

Advances in technology make possible certain instructional approaches that heretofore were difficult to implement. One of these advances is the use of computers to present video instructional materials for student-directed learning. In the experimental program described here, we use a bilingual approach to teach aspects of English to deaf children who are fluent in ASL. The goal of this project is to explore ways that ASL and English can be used cooperatively to help deaf students learn more about English.

Language specificity in lexical organization: evidence from deaf signers' lexical organization of American Sign Language and English.

A sign decision task, in which deaf signers made a decision about the number of hands required to form a particular sign of American Sign Language (ASL), revealed significant facilitation by repetition among signs that share a base morpheme. A lexical decision task on English words revealed facilitation by repetition among words that share a base morpheme in both English and ASL, but not among those that share a base morpheme in ASL only. This outcome occurred for both deaf and hearing subjects. The results are interpreted as evidence that the morphological principles of lexical organization observed in ASL do not extend to the organization of English for skilled deaf readers.

Rhyme generation by deaf adults.

Congenitally deaf college students were asked to generate rhymes to 50 target words. Results of the investigation indicate that it is possible for deaf individuals to develop the sensitivity to the phonologic structure of the words necessary for rhyming: Approximately half of the responses generated correct rhymes. Of these correct rhymes, the majority were orthographically similar to their target (c.g., BLUE-glue and TIE-lie), although 30% were orthographically dissimilar to their targets (e.g., BLUE-through and TIE-sky), indicating an ability to generate rhymes independent of orthographic structure. Errors were analyzed in an attempt to determine the basis on which the subjects generated rhymes. Evidence of both orthographic and speech-related strategies were obtained.

Linguistic coding by deaf children in relation to beginning reading success.

The coding of printed letters in a task of consonant recall was examined in relation to the level of success of prelingually and profoundly deaf children (median age 8.75 years) in beginning reading. As determined by recall errors, the deaf children who were classified as good readers appeared to use both speech and fingerspelling (manual) codes in short-term retention of printed letters. In contrast, deaf children classified as poor readers did not show influence of either of these linguistically based codes in recall. Thus, the success of deaf children in beginning reading, like that of hearing children, appears to be related to the ability to establish and make use of linguistically recoded representations of the language. Neither group showed evidence of dependence on visual cues for recall.

Short-term recall by deaf signers of American Sign Language: implications of encoding strategy for order recall.

Two experiments were conducted on short-term recall of printed English words by deaf signers of American Sign Language (ASL). Compared with hearing subjects, deaf subjects recalled significantly fewer words when ordered recall of words was required, but not when free recall was required. Deaf subjects tended to use a speech-based code in probed recall for order, and the greater the reliance on a speech-based code, the more accurate the recall. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that a speech-based code facilitates the retention of order information.

High-performance liquid chromatographic analysis of egg yolk phospholipids.

A rapid and efficient method for the separation of egg yolk phospholipids by normal-phase high-performance liquid chromatography has been developed. The separation is accomplished on an Ultrasil-NH2 column using hexane, isopropanol, methanol and water mixtures with direct ultraviolet detection at 206 nm. Phospholipids from a methanol extract of fresh lyophilized egg yolks were analyzed providing complete separation of (in order of elution) neutral lipids, phosphatidylcholine, sphingomyelin, lysophosphatidylcholine and phosphatidylethanolamine. Identification of eluting species was accomplished by comparative retention times of standard samples by thin-layer chromatographic analyses of collected fractions. Furthermore, a mixture of naturally occurring phospholipid standards from bovine and egg sources has been separated by this method. In addition to separating the individual classes of phospholipids, in some instances, separation of molecular species within a class was achieved as in the case of cerebrosides, sphingomyelin and partially with phosphatidylethanolamine.