cahiers de psychologie cognitive

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KEY WORDS : deaf, Stroop effect, automatic word recognition, automatic word ... of giving the picture's name, the subject had to produce a manual yes/no response ... The color naming Stroop test seems to tap the automaticity in word naming ...
Cahiers de Psychologie

Cognitive,

1983, 3, 3 , 255-272.

cahiers de psychologie cognitive DIRECTION SCIENTIFIQUE

AUTOMATICITY IN WORD RECOGNITION AND IN WORD NAMING — Jean Paul CODOL, maître de recherche au CNRS, UER de Psychologie, Université de Provence, Aix-en-Provence.

— Jean PAILHOUS, maître de recherche au CNRS, IBHOP, Université Aîx-Marseiile II, Marseille.

— Pierre LECONTE, professeur à l'UER de Psychologie, Université de Lille III.

— Bernard RIME, professeur à la Faculté de Psychologie, Université Catholique de Louvain.

— Pierre MOUNOUD, professeur à la Faculté de Psychologie, Univeisité de Genève.

BY THE DEAF

Jacqueline LEYBAERT, Jésus ALECRIA & Edgar FONCK Université Libre de Bruxelles, Laboratoire de Psychologie Expérimentale, U 7 avenue Ad. Buyl, 1050 Bruxelles, Belgium

COMITE D'ÉDITION

J. ALEGRIA, Bruxelles, Belgique L. BAINBRIDGE, Oxford, U.K. C BASTIEN, Aix-en-Provence H.E. BISHOP, Toronto, Canada J.P. BRONCKART, Genève, Suisse A. BULLINGER, Genève, Suisse G. BUTTERWORTH, Southampton, U.K. E. V. CLARK, Stanford, U.S.A. J. COSTERMANS, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belg. J. CREPAULT, Monoton, Canada J.P. DECONCHY, Paris, France R. DROZ, Lausanne, Suissis Y. G1ROUARD, Trois-Rivières, Canada L. GRANGER, Montréal, Canada J. A. GRAY, Oxford, U.K. E. FISCHBEIN. Tel Aviv, Israël W. HACKER, Dresde, R.D.A. M. HUTEAU, Paris, France M. JARYMOWICZ, Varsovie, Pologne J. JASPARS, Oxford, U.K. A. KARMILOFF-SMITH, Londres, U.K.

DIRECTEUR DE LA PUBLICATION

Jean Pailhous, Laboratoire de Psychologie de l'Apprentissage, IBHOP, rue des Géraniums, 13014 Marseille - Tél. 16 (91) 66.21.22.

M X . KASERMANN, Bern, Suisse J. LAUTREY, Paris, France M. LEFEBVRE-PINARD, Montréal, Canada J. LEPLAT, Paris, France J.P. LEYENS, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgique I. NËILSON, Glasgow, U.K F. NEWCOMBE, Oxford, U.K. F. ORSINI, Aix-en-Provence, France J. PAILLARD, Marseille, France A. PALMONARI, Bologne, Italie B. PAVARD, Paris, France E. PERRET, Zürich, Suisse J. PYNTE, Aix-en-Provence,. France J. RETSCHITZKl, Fribourg, Suisse K. R. SCHERER, Giessen, R.F.A. X. SERON, Bruxelles, Belgique S. STRAUSS, Tel Aviv, Israël G. T18ERGHIEN, Grenoble, France G. d'YOEWALLE, Louvain, Belgique J. S. WATSON, Berkeley, U.S.A. G. di STEFANO, Padoue, Italie.

Reconnaissance et nomination automatiques des mots chez les sourds. Deux groupes de sujets sourds différant par la qualité de leur parole et un groupe contrôle d'entendants ont passé deux tests Stroop différant par la modalité de la réponse : manuelle ou- vocale. Dans la tâche manuelle, l'interférence était faible et similaire dans les trois groupes. Ceci indique que les sourds reconnaissent les mots imprimés automatiquement tout comme le font les entendants. Dans la tâche de nomination, l'interférence était' identique chez les sourds parlant bien et les entendants. Chez les sourds parlant mal, elle était plus faible. L'automaticitê dans la nomination des mots semble donc être liée à la qualité de la parole. Ces résultats sont discutés par rapport aux conclusions provenant des expériences de mémoire à court terme chez les sujets sourds.

SECRÉTARIAT DE RÉDATION ET ADMINISTRATION

Françoise JOUBAUD, Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitive, LPA, IBHOP, rue des Géraniums, 130U Marseille - Tél. 16 (91 i 66.21.22. MOTS

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KEY

CLES : sourd, effet Stroop, reconnaissance des mots, nomination automatique des mots. WORDS : deaf, Stroop effect, automatic automatic word naming.

word

automatique recognition,

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Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitive

INTRODUCTION The Stroop task requires people to name the ink color in which a word has been printed as quickly as they can. This task is difficult to do when the word is a color name different from the ink color, e.g. "RED" written in blue (Stroop, 1935 ; see Dyer, 1973, and Jensen & Rohwer, 1966, for reviews). This interference effect indicates that subjects cannot ignore the word even though it would be advantageous to do so. On the other hand, the subject's naming task is facilitated when the color's name is written in its own color (Hintzman, Carre, Eskridge, Owens, Shaff &. Sparks, 1972). The classical explanation of the Stroop interference effect has centered on response competition processes (Klein, 19.64 ; Keele, 1972 j Dyer, 1973 ; Posner & Snyder, 1975 -, Lupker, 1979). While the subject is actively processing the relevant input (the color), (s)he is also passively processing the word. Because the naming response to a written word is faster than to a color patch, it will become available first and interfere with ink naming by occupying a preeminent position in the motor output channel. In order to produce the correct response, the subject must clear this channel by. suppressing the tendency to pronounce the word name, a process which takes time. The magnitude of the interference effect in the naming task strongly suggests that the output interference plays an important role in this sort of task. Competition between two vocal responses cannot account for all the results obtained with the Stroop paradigm. A reduced but significant interference also appears in tasks where an overt verbal response is not required : button-pressing task, card-sorting task, etc... (Pritchatt, 1968 ; White, 1969 , Keele, 1972 j Schmit & Davis, 1974 j Martin, 197S). Of course, covert verbalising during the achievement of the task cannot be totally excluded. In Pritchatt's experiment, however, everything was done to avoid covert verbalisation. In one condition, the response keys were labeled with color patches, and a significant interference was again obtained. Lupker & Katz 0 9 8 0 , using a picture-word interference task, controlled the .output processes. Instead of giving the picture's name, the subject had to produce a manual yes/no response, meaning that the picture represented a dog or not. They found a small, but significant, amount of interference. They hypothesize that when the response asked is quite divorced from any response tendency evoked by the printed word, as was the case in their experiment, thé output interference is considerably reduced, the remaining one belonging to the pre-output stages. Neill (1977) pointed out an interesting conclusion in this line : in a vocal naming task, the distracting response promoted by the word had to be suppressed before making che appropriate color response, while this is not necessary in a manual key press task.

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In button-pressing and card-sorting tasks, the subject muts adopt a spatial code, which is totally arbitrary with regard to the word, e.g. the response to the color "yellow" is at the extreme-right. So, -the printed word should not automatically evoke the tendency to a particular motor response. Any observed interference in sjich tasks must be attributed to pre-output stages, and basically to a stage where the subject must consider the relevant information in order to make the decision asked by the task. Interference may arise at this level because the word, in addition to its name, supplies semantic information, which could interact to various degrees with the relevant information. The fact that the interference is considerably reduced in tasks where no vocal response is required strongly suggest that output interference, as Lupker & Katz (1981) say, "apparently account for the lion's share of the interference1'. As said before, a facilitation effect had also been observed when the word and the color in which it is printed arc the same, or when they are setttantically related (Hintzman & al., 1972 j Dalrymple-Alford, 1972). This phenomenon has been less studied than the interference effect. Particularly, its locus remains unclear. Lupker (1982) and Lupker & Katz (1982) have suggested that the facilitation observed in these conditions results from the processes involved in accessing the internal lexicon and not from the output processes. On the other hand, Stirling (1979) has shown that the congruency between the relevant and irrelevant attributes of a Stroop stimulus can facilitate both the encoding of the relevant attribute and the elicitation of the correct response. What can the Stroop paradigm show us about cognitive processes in deaf subjects ? First, this test can give us some information about automatic word processing, as Posner & Snyder (1975) have discussed it. In a previous experiment (Leybaert, Alegria & Morais, 1982), we have shown that in a card-sorting version of the Stroop test, the deaf exhibit as much interference as do hearing subjects. "We concluded that automatic word recognition is similar in deaf and hearing subjects. As far as we know, there is only one experiment to which we could compare our results. Allen (1970, using a Stroop test, measured the time taken by deaf and hearing subjects to name aloud the color of 20 stimuli displayed on a card. The results show that, while the deaf took longer with the incongruent card than with the control one, they exhibited less interference than the hearing subjects. The contrast between Allen's and our results can be explained by the same model which accounts for the differences between tasks involving vocal and non vocal responses. In the former case, most of the interference comes from the output processes, due to response competition. The deaf may be less susceptible to interference than the hearing at this level if for them a covert vocal response is not automatically produced each time a word activates his lexical representation. In the

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card-sorting task, the observed interference mainly comes from the pre-output stages. At this level, the availability of a vocal response plays no role, so the interference is- similar in both groups of subjects. Our suggestion is that there is no difference between deaf and hearing subjects in automatic word recognition, but that there could be an important one in the association of a vocal response to a word after it has been recognized. For the hearing, written words are just a conventional representation of speech and the association between the written and the spoken word is quite overlearned. Among the deaf, speech is an activity which is generated, controlled and corrected by long exercises. For this reason, the internal production of the name corresponding to written verbal material may intervene with more difficulty among them than among hearing subjects. The color naming Stroop test seems to tap the automaticity in word naming by deaf subjects. This skill is probably related to the tendency to manipulate words internally, i.e. to use speei u as a mean of assisting mental activities. Several studies, usinsr different paradigms (paires associate learning tasks, free or serial recall procedures, memory span, recognition memory tasks, cancellation tasks) have shown that the deaf do not use spontaneously phonological representations in cognitive activities like memorizing and silent reading (see Conrad, 1979, pp. 7092 for a review). Consistent effects of the degree of deafness have been shown by Chen (1976) and Conrad (1973). For example, hearing subjects missed almost twice as many silent "è" Jas did the deafest group with a hearing loss greater than 80 dB, while the results of a hard-of-hearing group fell between these two (Chen, 1976). Locke & Locke (197D have shown an effect of the intelligibility of the deaf s speech. They found that hearing children predominantly confused letters that are phonetically similar. Deaf children with assessed unintelligible speech predominantly confused letters with similar fingerspellings, while deaf children with intelligible speech had confusions which fell neatly between those of the other two groups. In their study, however, it is unknown how this classification of the deaf is related to hearing loss. Conrad (1970) first showed that some deaf subjects with greatly impoverished auditory experience can use internal speech to achieve a short-term memory task. In this experiment,' all subjects had a hearing loss greater than 75 JB in the better ear. The subjects read consonant sequences for immediate written recall. An error analysis suggested a dichotomous classification of subjects into those primarily relying on articulatory coding and those relying on some other mediating code which could depend on shape. This classification correlated significantly with teachers' ratings on quality of speech : good intelligibility of speech facilitates its internalization, that is to say its utilization in cognitive activities. One could think that the intelligibility of the vocal speech has also an effect on the automaticity in word naming.

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The present experiment was designed to assess that the profoundly deaf differ from the hearing, not in their capacity to recognize automatically familiar printed words, but well in their ability to associate rapidly a name to the recognized word. The subjects will be presented with two Stroop tests differing by the response mode, either a button-pressing or a vocal one. In the manual response mode, the subject is supposed to adopt a spatial code, totally arbitrary with regard to the printed word. The interference appearing in this task is localized at the pre-output stage, so it will be similar in hearing and deaf su jects. When a vocal response is required, a massive interference due to the activity of the output stages of processing will appear in the hearing subjects. If the availability of the vocal response is weaker in the deaf, this interference will also be weaker than the one observed among the hearing. We will also examine the relationship between the quality of the vocal speech of the deaf and the interference appearing in a Stroop test. A positive correlation will be expected under the vocal response mode, but not under the manual one. When the word and the color are congruent, a facilitation effect is expected for all subjects in all conditions. The comparison of this effect under the two response modalities and between the deaf and the hearing will give us more information about its locus. If the facilitation occurs only at a pre-output level, the effect will be similar in deaf and hearing, and under both response modalities. On the other hand, if the congruency between the word and the color also facilitate the execution of a vocal response; the facilitation effect will be greater in the naming task than in the manual one and will be different for the hearing and for the deaf.

METHOD Materials Stimuli in the ' incongruent condition were the four words ROUGE (red), VERT (green), BLEU (blue) and JAUNE (yellow), written in each of the named colors except for the one congruent with the written word. In the congruent condition, each word was written in its own color. The stimuli used in the control condition consisted in four letter strings, composed by the 9 consonants taken from the color's names : NVJR, TXRB, CRNBR and LRJGV. We have prefered this kind of stimuli instead of strings of Xs or Os (used by Regan, 1978 > Martin, 1978 , Neill, 1977 and many others) because they are nearer to real words from a visual point of vue than Xs or Os are. At the same time, they create less confusion than control stimuli which are anagrams of the color's names (like those used by Keele, 1972 ; and Hintzman & al., 1973). One block of stimuli consisted in 72 trials, 24 in each of the three conditions. Each color appeared with the same frequency in each condition. The order of stimuli within each block

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was random, except for the following constraints : runs of more than three trials of the same color and of more than four trials of the same condition were not accepted. The stimuli were generated by an original program on a Apple II mini-computer, which controlled their presentation and recorded the subject's responses. Each stimulus was approximatively 3 cm high and 12 cm wide.The subject was seated in front of a color T.V. (OTAKE. color 9000 V-M, MultiStandard PAL/SECAM). Viewing distance was SO cm. The stimuli subtended a visual angle of 8.58° horizontally and 2.14° vertically. They appear in the middle of the screen, at the level of the subject's eyes. The response keyboard was made up of 4 buttons, inserted behind an inclined panel and disposed in such a way that the fingers tips of the subject would rest naturally on them when the hands were put flat on the panel. The distance between the two buttons of each hand was of 2 cm., and between the two buttons involving the two index fingers, 9 cm. The buttons activate microswitches, which were related to the computer. They corresponded to the colors as following : "red", left middle finger j "gree.n", left index finger -, "blue", right index finger j "yellow", right middle finger. To prevent any rehearsal process of the colors' places by the subject, a panel displaying four color strips was placed behind the response key. In the naming task, a vocal key (I.C. Model, Electronic Development), interfaced with the computer through a timer (Electronic Development), recorded the subject's response. Procedure The trials began with the presentation of a white square which appeared in the middle of the screen during 500 msec. As soon as this warning signal disappeared, the stimulus was presented. The subject's response stopped it and a feed-back appeared at the bottom of the screen. The number of the trial (from 1 to 72) on the right side, and the word "LENT" (slow) or "RAPIDE" (fast) on the left side. This evaluation was calculated by the computer by comparing the current RT to the mean of the preceding RTs in the same condition in the block. Reaction tiroes were recorded in milliseconds by the computer from the onset of the stimulus to the depression of the response key. The subject received the feed-back "ERREUR" (error) either if (s)he did not respond within the 2000 msec, following the stimulus presentation, or if (s)he pressed a wrong key. When a vocal response was required, the errors, were recorded by the experimenter. Subjects were tested individually in a quiet room, in their school for the deaf subjects, and in the laboratory for the hearing ones. They were said that they had to respond to the color of the stimuli and to ignore the words or letters which were written in that color. Instructions emphasized accuracy and speed. Oral and written communications were used with the deaf. The subjects were first shown the different types of stimuli written on a paper and asked to respond to a few trials presented

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by the computer, until it was clear that they had understood the task. They were tested in two sessions. Each session comprised three blocks of trials. Vocal and manual response blocks were alternated. Half of the subjects began with a manual response block, and the other half with a vocal response block. The duration of one block was approximatively 7 minutes -, one session took half an hour. The two first blocks of session 1 (one in each response modality) were considered as warm-up. Therefore, only the data from the last four blocks (the third block of session I, plus the three blocks of session 2) were taken into account. Subjects 31 deaf subjects, 14 boys and 17 girls, and l8 hearing subjects, 11 boys and 7 girls participated in the experiment. The deaf -came from two schools for the deaf using oral methods for communication and teaching. Three deaf boys were eliminated after the experiment because they made more than 50 % errors in the incongruent condition with a vocal response. The age of the remaining 28 deaf subjects varied from 10 years 5 months (10,5) to 18,2, with a mean of 13,8. Half of the subjects attended the secondary school, and the other half were in the second part of. the elementary school. They were all profoundly deaf, according to the classification of the BIAP (International Bureau of . Audiophonology). Mean hearing losses over 250, 500, 1000 and 2000 Hz were of 99-47 for the better ear (-range : 86.25 to 115 dB). All were prelinguistically deaf. Among the hearing subjects, one boy and one girl were eliminated for the same reason as the deaf boys. Because the Stroop test involves reading skills, the hearing subjects were matched with the deaf for the school level rather than for age. Their age varied from 9,1 to 14,1, with a mean of 11,10. They were paid for their participation in the experiment. All subjects had correct color vision. After the experiment, the deaf s ' own teachers were asked to rate each subject for speech intelligibility on a four-point scale : speech wholly understandable - speech easy to understand speech difficult to understand - speech effectively incomprehensible. The reference taken was their own comprehension of the speech of profoundly deaf children of the corresponding ages.

RESULTS A few trials were lost due to equipment malfunctions (2,1 %). Errors reached 6,2 % and the corresponding reaction times (RTs) were discarded from the analysis.

the

A preliminary analysis showed no difference between RTs for the first and second experimental block of trials