VOA慢速英语2011--A New Reason for Why the Deaf May Have T

Health Report - A New Reason for Why the Deaf May Have Trouble Reading

This is the VOA Special English Health Report.
Deaf people may have no trouble communicating English words through American Sign Language, or ASL. But studies of ASL users show that, on average, educated deaf adults are likely to read at the level of a nine-year-old.
The explanation has always been that this is because they never learned to connect letters with sounds. But a recent study shows that deaf readers are just like other people learning to read in a second language. Linguist¹ Jill Morford led the study.
JILL MORFORD: “The assumption has always been that the problems with reading were educational issues with what’s the right way to teach reading when you can’t associate sounds with letters. But what we’re finding is that all this time we’ve been ignoring the fact that they’re actually learning a new language.”
Ms. Morford is a professor at the University of New Mexico and part of a research center at Gallaudet University in Washington. Most students at Gallaudet are deaf; the center studies how deaf people learn and use language.
Professor Morford says signers are like English learners whose first language uses a different alphabet.
Easter Faafiti uses sign language to communicate with a teammate during practice by the women's basketball team at Gallaudet University in January
JILL MORFORD: “Anyone who has a first language that has a written system that’s very different than English, like Arabic or Chinese or Russian, knows that learning to recognize and understand words in English is much more challenging than if you already speak a language that uses the same orthography².”
The orthography is the written system and spelling of a language. Of course, with signers, their first language has no written system at all, just hand gestures. Gallaudet professor Tom Allen explains what effect this has on reading.
TOM ALLEN: “We're not dealing³ with representations in the brain which are primarily auditory. You know, people when they read, they kind of hear -- there’s a silent hearing going on when you read a word, when a hearing person reads a word. When a deaf person reads a word, there’s not. They see the word and there’s some kind of an orthographic⁴ representation. And some of the research in our center has shown that when deaf readers read an English word, it activates⁵ their sign representations of those words.”
Signers can face the same problems as other bilingual people. Their brains have to choose between two languages all the time. Take the words "paper" and "movie." Their spelling and meaning are not at all similar. But, as Professor Allen points out, the signs for them are.
TOM ALLEN: “The sign for paper, you hold one hand flat and you just lightly tap it with a flat palm on the other hand, and you do that a couple times and that means paper. Now, movie is, like, very similar. One of the hands keeps a flat hand shape and it just kind of lightly moves back and forth⁶ as if it were a flickering⁷ image on a screen.”
The study is in the journal Cognition.
And that's the VOA Special English Health Report, written by Kelly Nuxoll. To learn about other research on bilingualism, go to voaspecialenglish.com. And you can find captioned⁸ videos of our reports on the VOA Learning English channel on YouTube. I'm Steve Ember.

1 linguist   

n.语言学家；精通数种外国语言者

参考例句：

• I used to be a linguist till I become a writer.过去我是个语言学家，后来成了作家。
• Professor Cui has a high reputation as a linguist.崔教授作为语言学家名声很高。

2 orthography   

n.拼字法，拼字式

参考例句：

• In dictionaries,words are listed according to their orthography.在词典中，词是按照字母拼写顺序排列的。
• American and English orthography are very much alike.美语与英语的拼字方法非常相像。

3 dealing   

n.经商方法，待人态度

参考例句：

• This store has an excellent reputation for fair dealing.该商店因买卖公道而享有极高的声誉。
• His fair dealing earned our confidence.他的诚实的行为获得我们的信任。

4 orthographic   

adj.正字法的，拼字正确的；正射

参考例句：

• Then place an osg:Camera above the subgraph to create an orthographic projection. 你所要做的是将你的文字创建在一个子图中。 来自互联网
• What is to be represented, and how? Haitian Creole orthographic debates. 要表现什麽？如何表现？海地克理奥尔拼字法的争论。 来自互联网

5 activates   

使活动，起动，触发( activate的第三人称单数 )

参考例句：

• Activates the window and displays it in its current size and position. 激活窗口，保持当前的大小及位置不变。
• Pulling out the alarm switch activates alarm and pushing it deactivates it. 闹钟的开和关是通过拔出和按入闹铃开关实现的。

6 forth   

adv.向前；向外，往外

参考例句：

• The wind moved the trees gently back and forth.风吹得树轻轻地来回摇晃。
• He gave forth a series of works in rapid succession.他很快连续发表了一系列的作品。

7 flickering   

adj.闪烁的，摇曳的，一闪一闪的

参考例句：

• The crisp autumn wind is flickering away. 清爽的秋风正在吹拂。
• The lights keep flickering. 灯光忽明忽暗。

8 captioned   

a.标题项下的； 标题所说的

参考例句：

• This paper reviews the production, development and nationalization of the captioned materials. 本文就铜系合金引线框架材料的生产、发展和国产化进程作一论述。
• Please advise other considerable hotels for this captioned group. 请推荐其它一些高级的旅馆给这一群打标语的人。