Department of Psychology, University of Milan-Bicocca.
Institute of Evolutionary Medicine, University of Zurich.
Cogn Sci. 2022 Feb;46(2):e13114. doi: 10.1111/cogs.13114.
Previous research has hypothesized that human sequential processing may be dependent upon hearing experience (the "auditory scaffolding hypothesis"), predicting that sequential rule learning abilities should be hindered by congenital deafness. To test this hypothesis, we compared deaf signer and hearing individuals' ability to acquire rules of different computational complexity in a visual artificial grammar learning task using sequential stimuli. As a group, deaf participants succeeded at all levels of the task; Bayesian analysis indicates that they successfully acquired each of several target grammars at ascending levels of the formal language hierarchy. Overall, these results do not support the auditory scaffolding hypothesis. However, age- and education-matched hearing participants did outperform deaf participants in two out of three tested grammars. We suggest that this difference may be related to verbal recoding strategies in the two groups. Any verbal recoding strategies used by the deaf signers would be less effective because they would have to use the same visual channel required for the experimental task.
先前的研究假设人类的序列处理可能依赖于听觉经验（“听觉支架假说”），预测序列规则学习能力会因先天性耳聋而受到阻碍。为了检验这一假说，我们比较了聋人手语使用者和听力个体在使用序列刺激的视觉人工语法学习任务中掌握不同计算复杂度规则的能力。作为一个群体，聋人参与者成功完成了任务的各个级别；贝叶斯分析表明，他们成功地在形式语言层次结构的上升级别上获得了几个目标语法中的每一个。总的来说，这些结果不支持听觉支架假说。然而，在三个测试语法中，年龄和教育程度匹配的听力参与者在其中两个语法上的表现优于聋人参与者。我们认为，这种差异可能与两组的语言复述策略有关。聋人手语使用者使用的任何语言复述策略都不太有效，因为他们必须使用实验任务所需的相同视觉通道。
