A Study on Word Association by Deaf College Students

Lee, YunSun; Won, SeongWok; Kim, JiSook

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2007;12(2): 237-255.

YunSun Lee^` , SeongWok Won^` , and JiSook Kim^`

이윤선(YunSun Lee)| 원성옥(SeongWok Won)| 김지숙(JiSook Kim)

ABSTRACT

Background & Objectives
It has been known that deaf individuals tend to have limited mental lexicon, and that it takes longer time for them to access semantic knowledge of a given word. The purpose of this study was to investigate the responses in word association tasks(word association set, association motif, word class) in college students who were deaf or were not.
Methods
The subjects included 30 deaf college students and 29 normal-hearing(NH) college students. Each student had to read 12 word cards and also had to write down words associated with a given stimulus word within 10 seconds.
Results
Firstly, there was a significant difference between the deaf and the NH students in the size of the associative set for a given word and the strength of the most frequently occurred response. Secondly, there was no significant difference between the two subject groups regarding association motif. Thirdly, both groups frequently associated noun responses to the noun stimulus.
Discussion & Conclusion
These findings imply that deaf students should improve their lexical competence based on organization and use of their mental lexicon.