memory span for arabic numerals and digit words in japanese kanji in deaf signers

© 2001 Japanese Psychological Association. Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Japanese Psychological Research2001, Volume 43, No. 2, 63–71

Memory span for Arabic numerals and digit wordsin Japanese kanji in deaf signers1

MARY FLAHERTY and AIDAN MORANDepartment of Psychology, University College Dublin, Dublin 4, Ireland

Abstract: According to the theory of working memory, the “phonological loop” is a slavesystem that stores a limited number of sounds for a short period of time. The question of howthis system works for deaf people reading a logographic script, kanji, was investigated. Wemeasured the memory span of a sample of Japanese hearing and deaf participants. Hearingsubjects were tested in Japanese and deaf subjects in sign language. Memory span wasassessed in control and articulatory suppression conditions. In the control condition, subjectswere required to recall various item sequences as quickly and accurately as possible. In thearticulatory suppression condition, the hearing subjects articulated the phrase no-no, and the deaf subjects expressed a pseudosign, while viewing the stimuli. Results showed that thememory span of the deaf for Japanese kanji was similar to that of their hearing peers. Thisfinding conflicts with previous research which suggested that for users of English, the deafdisplay consistently shorter memory spans than do their hearing counterparts. In addition, wediscovered that in contrast to their hearing colleagues, the deaf Japanese subjects were re-latively immune to expected articulatory suppression effects. This finding raises the possibilitythat working memory coding processes are not universal.

Key words: memory, Japanese, deaf signers.

Working memory

Working memory is a limited-capacity systemwhose major function is to store and manipu-late currently relevant information for suchcognitive activities as problem solving and sen-tence comprehension. According to Baddeley(1986), a key component of this system is the “phonological loop,” which is specializedfor holding and recycling a small amount ofspeech-based information. The existence of theloop is supported by the “word length” effect,whereby people’s memory span for words is inversely related to how long it takes topronounce them. This finding that memory

span is inversely related to word length extendsacross a wide range of materials – except whenarticulatory rehearsal is suppressed (e.g., bybeing required to repeat the word “the” whileattempting to memorize information). Articu-latory suppression prevents the transformationof visual material into a phonological codethrough the occupation of the phonologicalloop (Baddeley, Eldridge, & Lewis, 1981).

The phonological loop owes its structure, atleast in part, to the impact of spoken language.Specifically, the rehearsal-loop structure inworking memory is an inherent property of the auditory and vocal mechanisms in whichspeech is grounded. This principle leads to the

1 This research was kindly funded by a President’s Award, University College Dublin, and a Visiting Professorship,Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan. We are especially grateful to Professor Arai and the students at Tsukuba TechnicalCollege for the Deaf who participated in the study.

question: How do deaf people code informa-tion in memory, given their limited access tospeech? Could there be a “phonological loop”for sign language? Clear evidence exists thatdeaf subjects can and do use the phonology orsublexical structure of American sign language(ASL) for coding materials in working-memory tasks (Hanson, 1982). These phono-logical effects are primarily based on handshape. Studies have shown reduced span withmaterials requiring similar hand shapes (Klima& Bellugi, 1979; Poizner, Bellugi, & Tweney,1981) and intrusion errors that resemble thestimulus materials in terms of hand shape(Bellugi, Klima, & Siple, 1974; Krakow &Hanson, 1985).

Memory of the deaf

There is evidence that long-term use of a visuallanguage such as ASL can influence somenonlanguage visual abilities (Emmorey, 1998).The information processing of native signers hasbeen found to have a strong visual orientationfrom an early age (Fischgrung, 1990; Morariu& Brunig, 1984). Deaf subjects perform betterthan their hearing counterparts on tests ofvisual memory (Bellugi, O’Grady, Lillo-Martin,O’Grady Hynes, Van Hoek, & Corina, 1990;Emmorey, Kosslyn, & Bellugi, 1993).

However, the story changes with verbalmaterial. Deaf subjects display shorter memoryspans than hearing subjects for Englishlinguistic materials (Hanson, Liberman, &Shankweiler, 1982). Phonetic information islargely but not exclusively the province ofhearing people, and deaf people, particularlydeaf children, are found to have a verbal deficit (Conrad, 1972a; Olsson & Furth, 1966;Withrow, 1968). Reading presents many dif-ficulties to the deaf (Conrad, 1972b). Readingdifficulties in deaf children have generally been attributed to problems concerning two ofthe most important requirements for reading:the decoding process and general linguistic com-petence. However, research on deaf subjects’reduced ability with verbal material has beenprimarily limited to script based on sound, suchas written English.

Memory of Kanji2

Phonology and orthography are closely relatedin some scripts, such as English, and they arevirtually unrelated in others, such as Arabicnumerals and kanji. Japanese kanji have anumber of different phonetic translations,sometimes as many as five or six, depending onthe particular compound. There is no constantand reliable symbol-to-sound correspondencein kanji. Japanese has a large number of homo-phones and therefore phonemic representationis less distinctive than visual representation.

Studies have found that reading differenttypes of orthographies activates different pro-cessing strategies (Park & Arbuckle, 1977;Saito, 1981). Some report that, with kanji,meaning is directly accessed from print, andaccess to phonology follows access to meaning(Hatano, Kuhara, & Akiyama, 1981; Hatta,1977; Shimamura, 1987). After all, kanji do not have separable phonemic components, andtheir appropriate phonological representationsare very word specific. However, Osaka (1992)found that the pattern of errors in a memorytest depended on the particular kanji employed;most errors with concrete kanji (the meaningsof which can easily be visually imagined) were based on confusion of meanings, whilethe errors with abstract kanji (whose meaningsare hard to access via visual images) were notbased on meanings, but mostly on phoneticerrors. Indeed, some studies claim that thephonological principle is absolute with all writ-ing systems, including kanji (Perfetti, Zhang, &Berent, 1992; Wydell, Patterson, & Humphreys,1993). The dispute remains unresolved.

Readers of Japanese kanji must encode andremember more visual shapes than readers ofEnglish. Indeed, Japanese subjects performbetter than their American counterparts onspatial memory tests (Stevenson & Ying-Lee,1990). Learning kanji is a relatively complextask of visual recognition and memory, and thepossible influence of kanji on spatial memoryhas been considered (Flaherty & Connolly,1996).

64 M. Flaherty and A. Moran

© Japanese Psychological Association 2001.

2 Chinese characters as used in Japanese are called kanji.

Deaf memory of kanji

The study of memory in the deaf illustrates thepotential for a variety of strategies. Someresearchers (e.g., Wallace & Corballis, 1973)have asked whether the deaf have a speciallydeveloped capacity for visual memory thatcompensates for their diminished verbal one.The level of accuracy shown by deaf subjects is the same as their hearing peers on number-processing tasks (Epstein, Hillegeist, & Grafman,1994). Like Arabic numerals, kanji are alsologographs. Considering a possible affinitybetween kanji, sign and visual memory ability(Flaherty, 1998), the question arises as to how deaf adults who use sign might differ fromtheir hearing counterparts on memory span forkanji. In sign language, the lexical items aremade up of a finite set of hand configurations,spatial locations, and movements; in a similarmanner, kanji are also made up of a finite set of radicals and forms, and these units are alsospatially and visually related to one another inwriting.

The following hypotheses were investigated:

1. The performance of deaf subjects will besimilar to that of their hearing peers onnumber tasks. As kanji are essentially logo-graphs, deaf subjects will display similarmemory spans on both kanji and numerals3

to their hearing counterparts.2. If kanji are semantically mediated, then

memory under articulatory suppressionconditions will be relatively immune tointerference. If kanji activate a phoneticcode, then hearing subjects will experienceinterference in the verbal domain andmemory span will be reduced.

3. If the deaf subjects are using a sign-basedcoding in working memory, a suppressioneffect from irrelevant use of the hands willreduce memory span in the suppressioncondition. Articulatory suppression with

deaf American students has been success-fully employed using simultaneous repetitionof pseudosign (Wilson & Emmorey, 1997).The same will now be tested with Japanesesubjects.

Method

SubjectsTwenty-four Japanese deaf subjects (13 males,11 females; aged 18–24 years, mean = 21) and 23 Japanese hearing subjects (7 males, 16 females; aged 20–35 years, mean = 25)participated in the experiment.

All the deaf participants were prelinguallyand profoundly deaf (loss . 90 dB), but had noother limiting conditions. They were recruitedfrom Tsukuba Technical College for the Deaf,where both Japanese sign language and oralcommunication were used on a daily basis.Subjects used sign language outside the class-room. Twelve of them had learnt sign as a firstlanguage and 12 as adults. The hearing subjectswere students at Kwansei Gakkuin University.All subjects were considered to be of averageintelligence by their teachers, and all were in tertiary education. They were paid 1000 yen(equivalent to $10) for participation in theexperiment.

MaterialsFor measurement of memory span, eight sets ofrandom number sequences were prepared,four for the control and four for the suppres-sion condition, half in Arabic numerals andhalf in digit words. Each set began with three 2-item sequences followed by three 3-itemsequences, and so on to a maximum of three12-item sequences. Consecutive repetition of numbers and ascending and descendingsequences of more than two digits wereavoided. Sequences of numbers that containedmnemonic cues were eliminated (e.g., 1, 7 wasnot allowed because the Japanese words forthese, ichi and shichi, rhyme). A computer(Macintosh PowerBook 5300) was programmedto present these sequences at the rate of onedigit per second.

Memory span in Japanese hearing and deaf subjects 65


3 In order to test the need for phonological access whenreading kanji, it was decided to employ anotherlogographic script, numerals. In Japan, both kanji andArabic numerals are used to represent numbers on adaily basis (Denshikeisanki, 1970).

ProcedureSubjects were tested individually, the deaf inJapanese sign language, the hearing in Jap-anese. Measures of memory span for numeralsand digit words, under both control and sup-pression conditions, were taken in random order.The stimuli were presented via computer.

Each condition began with three 2-itemsequences, three 3-item sequences, three 4-item sequences, and so on to a maximum ofthree 12-item sequences. The sequences werepresented at the rate of one item per second.Each item appeared in the same position on amonitor.

In the control condition, the word ready4 waspresented. This prompted the person to press akey on a computer keyboard, after which thepresentation sequence began. This consisted of a blank screen (1500 ms), a fixation point(1500 ms), and the item sequence. Once theitem sequence had ended, the fixation pointreappeared for 1500 ms, followed by the wordrecall, prompting participants to start theirrecall. Participants immediately recalled thesequence, verbally for the hearing subjects, in sign for the deaf subjects, as quickly andaccurately as possible.

In the articulatory suppression condition, theword ready prompted the subject to press a keyon the computer keyboard, after which thepresentation of the phrase no-no5 appeared onthe screen for 3 s. Hearing subjects wereinstructed to begin articulating the suppressionphrase at the rate of approximately two phrasesper second on appearance of the phrase legendand to continue until the presentation of recall.A fixation point appeared on the monitor for 1 s to indicate that the item sequence was about to start. The sequences were presentedat the rate of one item per second. Each item

appeared in the same position on the monitor.After the item sequence, a second fixation point(1500 ms) and the word recall were displayed,thus prompting participants to start their recall.Participants immediately recalled the sequenceserially and verbally, as quickly and accuratelyas possible.

Articulatory suppression with deaf subjectsemployed a simultaneous repetition of a“pseudosign” (see Figure 1), which was madeby changing the hand shape from a fist to anopen hand (ASL “S” hand shape, ASL “5”hand shape), alternating the two hands. Thispseudosign has been shown to be capable ofinterfering with memory for hand configurationsin deaf people who read English (Wilson &Emmorey, 1997). The suppression gesture wasmodeled for subjects by the experimenter at a rate of approximately four repetitions persecond (two repetitions with each hand).Subjects were told that the gesture was to beginwhen the phrase no-no appeared and to endwhen the word recall appeared, whereuponsubjects began recall in sign. Responses of thedeaf were videotaped for later analysis.

For each condition, subjects continuedrecalling the item sequences until two incorrectresponses on the same item length were made.Memory span was operationalized as the lengthof the last correctly recalled sequence, fol-lowing Chincotta and Underwood’s (1997)methodology. If all three sequences at the lastlength were correct a score of .5 was added.Before testing, subjects were allowed threepractice trials for sequences of two items.

Results

Table 1 presents the mean and standarddeviation of recall scores for the two groupsunder control and suppression conditions. Thedata for both the hearing and deaf subjectswere analyzed with a three-way analysis ofvariance (ANOVA), with condition (control or suppression) and item (numerals or digitwords) as within-subjects factors and subjectgroup (deaf or hearing) as a fixed factor. Thememory spans of the hearing and deaf subjectswere similar, F(1, 38) = .35, ns. There was a



4 All instructions were written in Japanese.5 In experiments of articulatory suppression withEnglish, a single-syllable word, such as “the,” is used(Baddeley, Lewis, & Valler, 1984). As the “Th” sound isnot part of the phonetic representation in Japanese, theinterference word “the” would have been inappropriate.The mora no was deemed equivalent and effective froma pilot study carried out on 10 hearing Japanese people,who were not part of the subject population.



Figure 1. Illustration of the pseudosign employed in the suppression condition. The hand shapes alternatedbetween the ASL for S and 5 in a continuous fashion.

significant difference in the condition factor,F(1, 38) = 42.51, p , .0001, with recall in thecontrol condition (mean = 6.18) being signifi-cantly higher than the suppression condition(mean = 5.4). The effect of item was notsignificant, F(1, 38) = .40, ns. There was nosignificant interaction between condition anditem, F(1, 38) = .68, ns, nor between condition,item and subject group, F(1, 38) = .68, ns. Therewas a significant interaction between thesubject group and condition, F(1, 38) = 6.01, p , .01. Post hoc analyses revealed that thesuppression condition interfered significantlywith memory span in the case of the hearingsubjects, t(19) = 3.45, p , .001, but not with thedeaf subjects, t(19) = 1.34, ns.

There was no difference in the memoryspans of the native and later signers in eitherthe control condition – for the digit words, t(19) = .30, ns and for the numerals, t(19) = .58,ns – or under the suppression condition – forthe digit words, t(19) = .19, ns and for thenumerals, t(19) = –.34, ns.

Discussion

Memory span performance of the deaf wassimilar to that of their hearing peers onJapanese kanji. This finding runs contrary tomuch of the literature with English linguisticmaterial, where the deaf consistently displayshorter memory spans than their hearingcounterparts (Conrad, 1979; Hanson,Liberman, & Shankweiler, 1982; Lichtenstein,1982; Olsson & Furth, 1966; Withrow, 1968).The visual aspect of kanji would appear to suit

the specially developed capacity for visualmemory evident in the deaf (Emmorey et al.,1993; Nakano & Yoshizo, 1997). It would seem that the deficit in recall of English linguisticmaterial in the deaf may be more a function of the idiosyncrasies of written English than adeficit in recall of written material as such. Justas many deaf people are forced into an aural-oral world of lipreading and speaking totallyunsuited to their natural abilities, it would alsoappear that their reduced performance onEnglish linguistic material and reading may bedue to the script being inappropriate and nottailored for them.

Memory span performance on Arabicnumerals was comparable in the deaf and hear-ing subjects, replicating work done on Americandeaf and hearing subjects on number process-ing tasks (Epstein et al., 1994). The visual aspectof the two logographs, kanji and numerals,allowed the enhanced visual memory of thedeaf to compensate for their diminished verbalone.

For hearing subjects, both kanji andnumerals were detrimentally affected byarticulatory suppression, thus supporting theuniversal phonological principle (UPP) (Lesch& Pollatsek, 1993; Van Orden, 1987). The UPP predicts primary automatic activation of phonological information in words in alllanguages, that is, prelexical phonologicalcoding, even in deep orthographies such askanji (Perfetti & Zhang, 1991; 1995; Perfetti et al., 1992; Tan, Hoosain, & Peng, 1995). Thus,according to the UPP even kanji are not neces-sarily processed through the visual route but



Table 1. Means and standard deviations of memory spans of hearing and deaf subjects in the controland suppression conditions

Control Suppression

Mean SD Mean SD

Hearing subjectsDigit words 6.20 .27 5.12 .21Numerals 6.40 .26 5.32 .23

Deaf subjectsDigit words 6.10 .27 5.55 .21Numerals 6.02 .26 5.60 .23

involve prelexical phonology as a default pathfor hearing people.

However, in the case of the deaf there seemsto have been a relative immunity to sup-pression. When asked how they rememberedthe stimuli, the deaf subjects revealed that theyused a wide variety of strategies, such as visualmemory, phonetically based lip movement,sign and various combinations of strategies.Two subjects also said they used goroawase, a particular form of mnenomics particular toJapanese.6 A similar diversity of strategies hasbeen recorded with deaf subjects in English-based environments (Campbell & Wright, 1989;Dodd, Hobson, Brasher, & Campbell, 1983;Hanson, 1982, 1990). Deaf subjects may have atendency to seek such alternate strategies whilehearing subjects may be much more committedto the single strategy of phonological rehearsal.

There are some methodological weaknessesin this study that merit attention. First, whilethe deaf and hearing subjects were matched on education and age, it may have been moreenlightening to match them on reading ability.It seems that reading involves the deaf personin a second language-acquisition process. Thesequential processing of information in readingis especially difficult for deaf subjects (Flaherty,2000; King & Quigley, 1985; Nakamura, 1997),regardless of the particular script. Second, thechoice of pseudosign, while effective withEnglish-reading deaf signers (Wilson &Emmorey, 1997), may not have been suitable

for deaf people who use Japanese sign language.Finally, the current study was limited in usingonly digit words in kanji; future research in thefield might incorporate both kana and a widerange of simple and compound kanji words.

In conclusion, it would appear that scriptswhich have a close relationship between phon-ology and orthography, such as English, areinappropriate for the abilities of deaf signersand that research comparing the performanceof deaf and hearing subjects on such scripts willobviously find a deficiency in the scores of theformer. However, in scripts where the phon-ology and orthography are nearly unrelated,such as Arabic numerals and kanji, deaf sub-jects can compensate for their limited access to speech with visual, kinesthetic and motormemory strategies. This is not to say that kanjiare always mediated semantically and immuneto phonological processing. Indeed, hearingsubjects accustomed to the idea that scriptmaps speech, be it English or Japanese kanji,commit orthography to phonological rehearsalfor later retrieval. Thus the UPP, predictingautomatic activation of phonological informa-tion in words in all languages (Lesch &Pollatsek, 1993; Van Orden, 1987), is shown tohold strong, but not for all readers. Signing deafpeople are exempt from this UPP by default. It would appear then that kanji, too, may be excused from the phonological principle,depending on who is reading.

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(Received Ju ne 29, 1999; accepted July 1, 2000)



memory span for arabic numerals and digit words in japanese kanji in deaf signers

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