The purpose of this study was to examine comprehension by deaf students of stories presented in Signed English (SE) and American Sign Language (ASL), under three modal conditions manual-only, manual plus oral, and manual plus oral plus aural. It was predicted that: (1) an increase in comprehension would correspond to an increase in the number of modes used in presenting the stories; (2) ASL would be a more efficient method of communication than SE; (3) there would be an interaction effect between language and mode of presentation; and (4) in unbalanced bilinguals a translation to the dominant language would occur when a story was presented in the subordinate language. Thirty-six deaf subjects from the British Columbia provincial School for the Deaf participated in the study; their mean age was 16 years 7 months, and their average hearing threshold level in the better ear was 99.8 decibels with a range of 83 decibels to 113 decibels. All subjects had a minimum of five years. experience as students in total communication programs using SE. Three ghost stories (mean readability level = Grade 2.7) were videotaped under all modal conditions for each of the languages. In the experimental task, subjects were shown a different story under each of the three modal conditions; but each subject was given stories in only one language. After each viewing the subject's retelling was videotaped. Data analyses showed that: there was no significant treatment effect for mode of presentation; subjects reproduced stories presented in ASL better than SE stories; there was an interaction between language and modes, where adding speechreading to the manual-only modality led to higher comprehension scores in the SE presentations; and a majority of subjects retold ASL and SE stories in ASL. The results support ASL as being the more effective method of communication for signing deaf students who have extensive training in total communication and Signed English. It is suggested that total communication classes adopt an ASL-English bilingual program to enhance classroom communication and assist in the development of oral and aural skills, and that speech always accompany the use of SE. Suggestions were made for future research activities. / Education, Faculty of / Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of / Graduate

Six studies were conducted to investigate young children's earliest insights into the interpretive nature of knowing, or the formation of what has been called an "Interpretive Theory of Mind." This insight was operationalized as the ability to recognize that two persons exposed to precisely the same information can, nonetheless, end up holding sharply different opinions about what is the self-same reality. All of the studies made use of a set of pictures fitted with covers such that most of the underlying picture was hidden, leaving only an ambiguous set of lines visible through a small viewing window. The key question asked concerned subjects' understanding that other persons who have not seen the full picture but only the restricted view, and who know nothing about the full contents of the picture, are all nevertheless free and able to hold different beliefs about what is depicted in this restricted view. An important feature of this procedure is that it can assess both subjects' understanding of simple false belief as well as their understanding of the interpretive possibilities that such stimuli afford. This feature was exploited to demonstrate that young persons who appreciate that beliefs can be false—an achievement that is commonly taken to mark the point of entry into a theory-like understanding of mental life—cannot always be counted on to also appreciate that different interpretations of the same stimulus are possible. By exploring children's reactions to inherently ambiguous stimuli that, by design, easily lend themselves to misinterpretation, it is possible to distinguish between a theory of mind that rests entirely on notions of false belief (i.e., one that views the mind as a recording device capable only of mistakes of ignorance), and a more complex appreciation of the mind's more active capacity for constructively interpreting—and so misinterpreting—reality. What these studies reveal is that an interpretive theory of mind is different from, and later arriving than, an appreciation of the possibility of false belief, and, contrary to competing claims, this interpretive theory actually makes its first appearance during, but not before, the early school years. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between self concept and reading ability at different stages in a child's school career. Subjects were selected at random from grades three, five, seven, eight, ten and twelve from schools in one school district. Approximately 125 to 150 students at each grade level were tested with the Nelson Reading Test or the Nelson Denny Reading Test and the students were then assigned to groups of poor, average or good readers on the basis of their percentile scores for their grade. Twenty students were randomly selected from each ability group at each grade level to receive the Piers Harris Children's Self Concept Scale. Raw scores on the reading test were correlated with self concept scores for each grade level. Correlations were significant at the grade three, five, seven, and eight levels, lower but significant at the grade ten level and not significant at the grade twelve level. Mean scores for each ability group at each grade level were computed and analyzed in a six by three factoral design. Effects for ability group and interaction of grade and reading ability were significant. Differences between means for good and poor readers were significant at the grade three, five, seven and eight levels. Post hoc tests were done to find significant tetrad differences. It appears from the results of this study that although self concept and reading ability are positively correlated in the lower grades, the relationship becomes weaker after grade eight and is nonsignificant at the grade twelve level. / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate

The purpose of this investigation is to examine the effects of certain factors on adults auditory comprehension of complex sentences conjoined with before and after. The factors investigated are: conjunction choice, order of mention, clause placement, and general-knowledge constraints. The sentences used in the study fall into four syntactic categories (Before-1, Before-2, After-1, After-2) and two semantic categories (constrained by general knowledge and unconstrained). Sixteen subjects each participated in two tasks designed to elicit varying reaction times. Stimuli consisted of 160 pre-recorded sentences describing 40 sequences of two events, with corresponding slide illustrations. Reaction time to task stimuli was recorded to the nearest hundredth of a second. Square roots of the reaction times were subjected to analysis of variance. Results indicate that only the placement of the main clause produces a significant effect on subjects' responses, thus lending support to a growing body of data which suggests that the main clause holds a privileged position in the comprehension of complex sentences. Results are discussed with respect to experimental design, previous research and theories of sentence comprehension. / Medicine, Faculty of / Audiology and Speech Sciences, School of / Graduate

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