Abstract: Due to the lack of auditory experience, a great number of studies explored whether deaf readers were able to activate phonological information during reading. However, the experimental findings are controversial. Researchers argued that the lack of consistency across previous findings could be partially accounted for by individual differences and differences in research materials. On the one hand, the hearing loss, reading ability and oral ability of deaf readers can influence the activation of phonological information. On the other hand, most studies examined phonological representation of target word during sentence reading, few research has used tongue twister to investigate phonological processing in deaf readers. Tongue twister is sentence that contain a number of words with same initial consonants and/or the same vowels. Previous studies have found that the tongue-twister effect, that is, the tongue twisters took more time than the normal sentences in hearing readers, which support hearing readers are able to activate phonological information during reading. The present study investigated the tongue-twister effect in deaf college student by using eye tracking technique. The design was a 2 (group: deaf college students, hearing middle school students) × 2 (sentence: tongue twister, normal sentence) mixed design. The deaf college students were aged 19.43~20.50 years with a hearing loss above 80dB in their better ear and none had received a cochlear implant. They all learned the pinyin. Hearing middle school students were matched to the deaf college students on reading ability and IQ. 20 students in each group participated in the experiment. Their eye movements were recorded with Eyelink 1000 plus eye tracker. There are 44 tongue twisters and 44 normal sentences. The tongue twisters comprised sentences in which Chinese characters that sequentially followed each other shared similar spelling initials. Normal sentences were matched with tongue twisters in terms of the syntax structure, sentence length, number of character strokes and character frequency. The results showed that in the sentence level analysis, there were significant tongue-twister effects on reading rate, fixation count and regression count for hearing students, compared with normal sentences, the tongue twisters were read slower and took more fixation counts and regression counts. There were only significant tongue-twister effects on reading rate for deaf students, the tongue twisters were read more slowly than normal sentences. The analysis was further carried out by taking each individual character as areas of interest. For hearing students, no significant differences were found between tongue twisters and normal sentences on first fixation duration and gaze duration in all characters, however, there were significant tongue-twister effects on total reading time and regression out, the total reading time on the second to fifth characters in the tongue twisters were longer than they did in the normal sentences, and the third characters produced more regressions in the tongue twisters than normal sentences. For deaf students, no significant differences were found between tongue twisters and normal sentences on first fixation duration, gaze duration and total reading time in all characters. But there was a numerical tendency on the fourth characters for total reading time, the reading time of tongue twisters were longer than normal sentences. There were also significant tongue-twister effects on regression out for deaf students, the fourth characters produced more regressions in the tongue twisters than normal sentences. These results indicated that deaf students activated phonological information during reading, but the activation effect was weaker and appeared later than that of hearing students.

Key words: deaf college students, phonological information, tongue-twister effect, eye movement

摘要： 由于听觉经验的缺失，听障者能否在阅读中激活语音信息？目前的研究结果存在争议。绕口令效应指读者阅读绕口令的时间要显著长于控制句，这与语音信息的激活密切相关。本研究采用眼动技术考察听障大学生的绕口令效应。结果发现，无论是整体分析还是局部分析，听障大学生的绕口令效应都弱于健听学生，绕口令效应出现在词汇识别的晚期及句子整合阶段，听障大学生的绕口令效应在句子中比健听学生出现得更晚。这表明听障大学生在阅读中激活了语音信息，但激活程度比健听学生弱，出现得晚。

关键词: 听障大学生, 语音, 绕口令效应, 眼动