Effects of Hearing Status and Sign Language Use on Working Memory.

Autor/inn/en	Marschark, Marc; Sarchet, Thomastine; Trani, Alexandra
Titel	Effects of Hearing Status and Sign Language Use on Working Memory.
Quelle	In: Journal of deaf studies and deaf education, (2016) 2, S.148Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext (1); PDF als Volltext (2) Verfügbarkeit
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	1081-4159
Schlagwörter	Sign language; Memory; Deafness; Disabled students; Cognitive ability
Abstract	Deaf individuals have been found to score lower than hearing individuals across a variety of memory tasks involving both verbal and nonverbal stimuli, particularly those requiring retention of serial order. Deaf individuals who are native signers, meanwhile, have been found to score higher on visual-spatial memory tasks than on verbal-sequential tasks and higher on some visual-spatial tasks than hearing nonsigners. However, hearing status and preferred language modality (signed or spoken) frequently are confounded in such studies. That situation is resolved in the present study by including deaf students who use spoken language and sign language interpreting students (hearing signers) as well as deaf signers and hearing nonsigners. Three complex memory span tasks revealed overall advantages for hearing signers and nonsigners over both deaf signers and deaf nonsigners on 2 tasks involving memory for verbal stimuli (letters). There were no differences among the groups on the task involving visual-spatial stimuli. The results are consistent with and extend recent findings concerning the effects of hearing status and language on memory and are discussed in terms of language modality, hearing status, and cognitive abilities among deaf and hearing individuals.
Erfasst von	OLC
Update	2022/1/02