A Reversed-Typicality Effect in Pictures but Not in Written Words in Deaf and Hard of Hearing Adolescents

Two experiments investigated Chinese deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) adolescents’ recognition of category names in an innovative task of semantic categorization. In each trial, the category-name target appeared briefly at the screen center followed by two words or two pictures for two basic-level exemplars of high or middle typicality, which appeared briefly approximately where the target had appeared. Participants’ reaction times when they were deciding whether the target referred to living or nonliving things consistently revealed the typicality effect for the word, but a reversed-typicality effect for picture-presented exemplars. It was found that in automatically processing a category name, DHH adolescents with natural sign language as their first language evidently activate two sets of exemplar representations: those for middle-typicality exemplars, which they develop in interactions with the physical world and in sign language uses; and those in written-language learning.