Advances in Cognition, Education, and Deafness

Memory and Metamemory in Deaf Students

Memory and Metamemory in Deaf Students Hing Fung Tsui Michael Rodda Carl Grove T he memory capabilities of deaf students have been. studied extensively; however, no comprehensive picture has emerged because of several problems . It is difficult to define memory, for it is not a unitary concept, but instead involves a variety of theoretical models. The research questions asked at the outset of most of the studies seem to have adopted the assumptions of the structural and process models. Yet the target of investigation has frequently been the problem of representation or encoding, since audition is assumed to be related to sequential processing and hearing loss to spatial processing (e.g., O'Connor & Hermelin 1972, 1973; Hermelin & O'Connor 1973; Beck, Beck & Gironella 1977; Lake 1981; Das 1983). The search for differences between the deaf and the hearing has predominated, and little information is available on the underlying mechanism for the often-reported inferior performance of the deaf. The studies that explored sign-informational and syntactic effects on memory (e.g., Liben, Newell & Posnansky 1978; Tweney & Heiman 1977; Tweney, Heiman & Hoeman 1978) are in fact reactions to a deep-rooted controversy regarding the linguistic status of sign language. Beneath the controversy is another more basic theoretical argument about the relationship between language and cognition. Inevitably, the formulation of research questions is constrained by the adopted theoretical model; therefore it is important to have frameworks that address This paper was based on the doctoral dissertation of H. F. Tsui. The participation of the students of the Alberta School for the Deaf and R.].D. Williams Provincial School for the Deaf of Saskatchewan are thankfully acknowledged. 315 316 Cognitive Processes pertinent aspects comprehensively. What we term as memory may include various phenomena and processes, as the recent metacognitive models of Flavell (Flavell & Wellman 1977) and Brown (1975, 1978) have suggested. The metacognitive models have provided invaluable conceptual refinements for researchers. If one's focus is on development, then efforts should not be wasted on the basic processes, such as memory span. If one is intent on an inclusive view, then general cognitive schema, voluntary strategies, and metamemory (knowledge of memory and executive strategies) all would be taken into consideration. The newly emergent knowledge structure argument of Chi (Chi & Reese 1983; Chi & Ceci 1987) and the Vygotskyan notion of internalization (Vygotsky 1978) are also complementary to the general metacognitive paradigm. Based on these metacognitive and cognitive theories, the purpose of the present research was to obtain a holistic descriptive profile of the interaction among the different variables, i.e., retrieval, encoding, strategy, declarative metamemory, task conditions, knowledge, and age. THE RESEARCH STUDY The subjects were 24 severely to profoundly deaf students, between the ages of 9 and 20, with bilateral sensorineural loss. Declarative metamemory was investigated with four slightly modified subtests from Kreutzer, Leonard, and Flavell's (1975) interview-story list, study plan, retrieval event, and opposites-arbitrary. A systematic scoring scheme was also developed for the subtests. The responses were rated by three independent raters. Encoding was tested with a spatial position vs. temporal position task. Three cards with either three digits or three letters were placed face down in a row. Each card was exposed for one second and put back in the original position. The temporal order of exposure did not occur from left to right or right to left in all trials, and the second one never corresponded to the spatial middle position. Detailed instruction and practice were given. After each presentation, the subject was asked either a "spatial middle" question or a "temporal middle" question. Overall performance and confusion error pattern were analyzed. Semantic knowledge was assessed in the pretest word review. The words used had high imagery value derived from a pilot study. Also, the words were within a designated word-frequency range, each having six or seven letters. Retrieval was investigated with free recall of a clusterable word list and pairedassociate recall of prototypically associated items and non-prototypically associated items. The words used in these two tasks were the same ones as in the word review. The use of clustering strategy and serial strategy was analyzed from the freerecall protocols using two statistical procedures. To obtain an index of the working memory capacity, the digit span forward test was taken from WISC-R (Wechsler 1974) with some procedural modification. A color sequence matching task was used as an interpolated task between tests as well as an informal context for behavioral observation. The testing was conducted by the first...