关键词: 聋人, 阅读, 眼动研究

Abstract: Reading is an important approach to acquire and access knowledge, and is also an indispensable cognitive activity for individual development. Nowadays, there have been rich achievements in reading for hearing readers, but for deaf readers, their essential issues of reading are not clear. It’s reported that deaf readers have a prevalent difficulty in reading. Levels of illiteracy in deaf populations around the world have been extremely high for decades. Many deaf readers cannot reach the high-level reading skills, and even their reading level lag far behind the hearing peers. Therefore, to explore the cognitive reasons for the poor reading level of deaf readers has become a significant focus in special education and psychology. In order to attempt to explain this universal difficulty in the deaf population, much research has been generated, but there is no general agreement concerning the factors underlying the poor reading performance of deaf readers. Recently, there are some studies use the technique of eye movements to reveal about the cognitive process in reading, that is to say, it have been a new trend for researchers to investigate the written-language processing of deaf readers by the pattern of oculomotor control. This paper systematically reviews the prior researches used eye movements technique on deaf readers in English and Chinese reading. Given that deaf readers don’t have direct auditory access to languages, they access and process language via different sensory channels, visual input. Hence, the studies were focus on the phonological codes and visual attention. The studies about the perceptual span of deaf reader have found that skilled deaf readers have a larger perceptual span, which had provide the evidence for deaf readers’ enhanced attentional allocation to the parafoveal. There were many studies have explore whether the deaf readers have activated the phonological codes during reading, which results have no consistency. Using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm, the researchers have found neither of the less-skilled and skilled deaf readers processed phonological information in parafoveal vision, that is to say, there is no link for the phonological codes and deaf reading. From prior studies, we can see that during reading less-skilled deaf readers have rely more on contextual cues to boost word processing, further more deaf readers can take use of the sign translation in parafoveal vision, which is an specific code style for deaf. Base on the review of the prior researches, we have put forward some advice for the future: (1) Combined the technique of eye movements and ERPs to explore the cognitive mechanism for the reading difficulty of deaf readers; (2) There are many homophone in Chinese, so it’s necessary to explore the phonological codes of deaf readers during Chinese reading; (3) To investigate the relationship between the visual attention and reading of deaf readers, whether the enhanced attentional allocation to the parafoveal would weaken the foveal processing; (4) Compared the less-skilled and skilled deaf reader’s efficiency for the processing of sign language, which maybe an crucial influence factors for deaf reading.

Key words: Deaf readers, Reading, Eye movements