Dye Matthew W G, Hauser Peter C
Department of Speech and Hearing Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820, USA.
Department of American Sign Language and Interpreting Education, National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Rochester, NY 14623, USA.
Hear Res. 2014 Mar;309:94-102. doi: 10.1016/j.heares.2013.12.001. Epub 2013 Dec 16.
Deaf children have been characterized as being impulsive, distractible, and unable to sustain attention. However, past research has tested deaf children born to hearing parents who are likely to have experienced language delays. The purpose of this study was to determine whether an absence of auditory input modulates attentional problems in deaf children with no delayed exposure to language. Two versions of a continuous performance test were administered to 37 deaf children born to Deaf parents and 60 hearing children, all aged 6-13 years. A vigilance task was used to measure sustained attention over the course of several minutes, and a distractibility test provided a measure of the ability to ignore task irrelevant information - selective attention. Both tasks provided assessments of cognitive control through analysis of commission errors. The deaf and hearing children did not differ on measures of sustained attention. However, younger deaf children were more distracted by task-irrelevant information in their peripheral visual field, and deaf children produced a higher number of commission errors in the selective attention task. It is argued that this is not likely to be an effect of audition on cognitive processing, but may rather reflect difficulty in endogenous control of reallocated visual attention resources stemming from early profound deafness.
聋儿的特点是冲动、易分心且无法持续保持注意力。然而，过去的研究测试的是听力正常父母所生的聋儿，这些聋儿很可能经历过语言发育迟缓。本研究的目的是确定缺乏听觉输入是否会调节未经历语言延迟的聋儿的注意力问题。对37名聋人父母所生的6至13岁聋儿和60名听力正常儿童进行了两个版本的连续操作测试。一个警觉任务用于测量几分钟内的持续注意力，一个分心测试则衡量忽略与任务无关信息的能力——选择性注意力。两项任务都通过分析错误委托来评估认知控制。聋儿和听力正常儿童在持续注意力测量上没有差异。然而，年龄较小的聋儿更容易被周边视野中与任务无关的信息分心，并且聋儿在选择性注意力任务中产生的错误委托数量更多。有人认为，这不太可能是听觉对认知加工的影响，而可能反映了早期严重耳聋导致的重新分配视觉注意力资源的内源性控制困难。
