VOA慢速英语:A New Reason for Why the Deaf May Have Trouble Reading

Deaf people may have no trouble communicating English words through American Sign Language, or ASL. But studies of ASL users show that, on average, educated deaf adults are likely to read at the level of a nine-year-old.
聋人使用美国手势语言(American Sign Language, or ASL)来交流可能没有什么困难。但是通过对ASL使用者的研究发现，受过教育的成年聋人的平均阅读水平可能只有相当于九岁儿童。

The explanation has always been that this is because they never learned to connect letters with sounds. But a recent study shows that deaf readers are just like other people learning to read in a second language. Linguist Jill Morford led the study.
一直以来的解释是，因为他们从未学过如何将单词与声音联系起来。但是最近的一项研究表明，聋人阅读者跟其他人学习用第二语言进行阅读时一样的。负责这项研究的是(吉尔 莫福德)Jill Morford。

JILL MORFORD: “The assumption has always been that the problems with reading were educational issues with what’s the right way to teach reading when you can’t associate sounds with letters. But what we’re finding is that all this time we’ve been ignoring the fact that they’re actually learning a new language.”
吉尔：“关于阅读问题的设想一直是关于如何用正确的方法来教导那些无法将声音与字母联系起来的教育问题. 但是我们发现，一直以来，我们一直忽略了他们其实是在学习一种新的语言的事实。”
 

Ms. Morford is a professor at the University of New Mexico and part of a research center at Gallaudet University in Washington. Most students at Gallaudet are deaf; the center studies how deaf people learn and use language.
莫福德是新墨西哥大学一位教授，也是位于华盛顿的加拉德特大学研究中心的一员。加拉德特大学的大部分学生都是聋人，该中心研究聋人如何学习与使用语言。

Professor Morford says signers are like English learners whose first language uses a different alphabet.
莫福德教授称，使用手语的人就像那些母语是其他字母系统的英语学习者。

JILL MORFORD: “Anyone who has a first language that has a written system that’s very different than English, like Arabic or Chinese or Russian, knows that learning to recognize and understand words in English is much more challenging than if you already speak a language that uses the same orthography.”
吉尔：“任何一个像阿拉伯人，中文人和俄罗斯人这样的母语书写系统与英语完全不同的，他们都知道要学习认识并理解英语单词都比阅读使用同样的拼字法的语言更加具有挑战性。”

The orthography is the written system and spelling of a language. Of course, with signers, their first language has no written system at all, just hand gestures. Gallaudet professor Tom Allen explains what effect this has on reading.
“拼字法”指的是一种语言的书写系统与语言拼写。当然，对使用手语的人来说，他们的第一语言并没有任何书写系统，只有手势。加拉德特大学的Tom Allen解释了这对阅读有什么影响。

TOM ALLEN: “We're not dealing with representations in the brain which are primarily auditory. You know, people when they read, they kind of hear -- there’s a silent hearing going on when you read a word, when a hearing person reads a word. When a deaf person reads a word, there’s not. They see the word and there’s some kind of an orthographic representation. And some of the research in our center has shown that when deaf readers read an English word, it activates their sign representations of those words.”
汤姆：“手语使用者不是在处理听觉在大脑中的呈现。当普通人在阅读时，他们一定程度上也在听---当听力正常的人在阅读单词时，有一个无声的听觉过程在进行。但当一名聋人在阅读时，没有这个过程。当他们看到单词时，某种正字法在脑中呈现。我们中心的一些研究证实，当聋人阅读一个英语单词时，会激活代表这个单词的手势。”

Signers can face the same problems as other bilingual people. Their brains have to choose between two languages all the time. Take the words "paper" and "movie." Their spelling and meaning are not at all similar. But, as Professor Allen points out, the signs for them are.
使用手语者也像其他双语人士一样面临同样的问题。他们的大脑总是要在两种语言中做出选择。以“paper”和“movie”两个单词为例。他们的拼写和意思都完全不同。但是，Allen指出，这两个单词的手势却是很接近的。

TOM ALLEN: “The sign for paper, you hold one hand flat and you just lightly tap it with a flat palm on the other hand, and you do that a couple times and that means paper. Now, movie is, like, very similar. One of the hands keeps a flat hand shape and it just kind of lightly moves back and forth as if it were a flickering image on a screen.”
汤姆：“paper的手势是，一只手放平，另一只放平的手掌轻轻地敲打这只手，这样做几次，意思就是paper。而movie也接近。其中一只手掌保持平铺的手的形状，缓慢的前后移动，就好像是屏幕上切换的图像。”

The study is in the journal Cognition.
该研究发表在《认知》期刊上。