Communication Mode and the Information Processing Capacity of Hebrew Readers with Prelingually Acquired Deafness

Two groups of students, one with prelingually acquired deafness, and a hearing control group participated in an experiment designed to examine the effect of communication mode on working memory coding and information-processing capacity. A research paradigm based on a letter-processing task was used as a test tool. Sixteen of the participants who were deaf (mean grade 6.9) were raised by hearing parents advocating a strict oral approach at home and at school. Another 16 students with deafness (mean grade 6.9), all of them children of deaf parents, acquired sign language as their primary language. The mean grade of the hearing control group was 6.5. Contrary to expectations, the groups' information-processing capacity was not biased by their preferred communication mode. Although the stimuli material was linguistic in nature, no evidence for linguistic coding was found.