Abstract:
Word familiarity is an important factor in word recognition and lexical access for hearing individuals. Subjective word familiarity ratings are hypothesized to reflect experience with words irrespective of the modality (i.e., spoken or written) through which exposure has taken place, and to provide an estimate of the size of the mental lexicon. To investigate how word familiarity is related to lipreading proficiency, 450 printed words were presented for rating on a seven-point scale to 50 deaf and 50 hearing participants. Preliminary results revealed that the deaf participants produced lower mean familiarity ratings than did the hearing participants, for high-, medium-, and low-familiarity words (hearing means= 6.7, 4.8, 3.0; deaf means= 6.0, 3.8, 2.6). Among the deaf participants, correlations between established familiarity ratings and individuals' ratings were reliably higher for excellent than for good lipreaders, a possible indication that perceptual experience influences the structure of the lexicon. At the same time, the performance of the excellent lipreaders provides support for the hypothesis that lexical organization does not depend on the perceptual input modality (i.e., vision versus hearing). [Work supported by NIH Grant No. DC00695.]