The language experience of deaf children: its relation to spontaneous rehearsal in a memory task.

This study was an investigation of whether the language history of deaf children is related to their delayed emergence of spontaneous memory strategy use. Use of rehearsal on a serial recall task was compared for 41 deaf (age 5 to 15 years) and 45 hearing (age 5 to 8 years) children. A lag of several years was noted in the emergence of spontaneous rehearsal for the deaf. Hierarchical discriminant function analysis showed language history to be a nearly perfect mediator of the relation between age and rehearsal use, effectively eliminating the lag in the emergence of rehearsal use. Increased language experience was hypothesized to be associated with automatization of language skills, and thus with decreased processing demands when language-based strategies are used.