Estratégias de reconhecimento visual de palavras ortográficas e datilológicas por pessoas surdas: relação entre natureza lexical e fonologia

Abstract

How do we recognize printed words and how does this process occur when the reader is a deaf person? How does this process occur if the words are spelled manually? In order to understand the role of the lexical and phonological relations of the Oral Language in the strategies of visual recognition of orthographic and dactilological words by deaf people, as well as to identify the strategies adopted in these processes, we developed an experimental research whose specific goal was to verify the Word Superiority Effect in the visual recognition of lexical items and distinct modality by deaf people, observing the activation focus of the process: level of letters or level of words, in order to verify when the lexicon heads the process or when the Oral Language's phonology starts to act in each condition and modality. Studies on the visual recognition of orthographic words in hearing people point to the phonological system of the Oral Language and the lexical type of the items as those responsible for altering the reader's performance in the recognition process. In deaf people who use Sign Language, phonological and lexical references are fed by another visuospatial language and can influence the performance of these subjects in the recognition process and confer a distinct role to the oral language phonological system and the lexical type of the items in the process. Considering that the structural basis of the Sign Language has a mechanism capable of crossing the oral language system through the use of the fingerspelling, we also add the dactilological word as situated in these relations. The experiment was off-line, composed of two naming tests, one for orthographic words and the other for dactilological words. Each test consisted in the presentation of items of five letters and of different lexical type. The participants were asked to reproduce the item in written form, in the case of the orthographic test, and in fingerspelling mode, in the case of the dactilological test. The sample consisted of 15 participants with 2º year of high school as minimum education. Comparing the two tests, the best performances stood out in both tests and had higher education than the worst performers, reflecting the central role of schooling in the process. In all categories, the performance in the orthographic test was better than the dactilological one, this can be due to the orthographic staticity, with direct memory effect in the recovery of the parts (bottom-up) or the familiarity of the features in the orthographic words, more frequent than dactilological ones. The results obtained in the orthographic and dactilological test show a significant difference (p <0.0001) in the order of hits by category: word (79.1% and 41.3%); pseudo-word (34.2% and 9.8%); non-word (13.3% and 1.8%), pointing to the word category as more productive. Participants developed the following recognition strategies: approximation, when there is an attempt to associate stimuli with near lexical items, common to the pseudo-word category; and adequacy, when there is a reconstruction of the anagram into a phonologically acceptable form in Portuguese, but not necessarily lexical, common to the non-word category.