LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY AND THE PREDICTION OF SPONTANEOUS REHEARSAL IN CHILDREN WHO ARE DEAF

This study was an investigation of the role of language proficiency an d automatization of language skills in the use of spontaneous rehearsa l strategies by children who are deaf. Thirty-one profoundly deaf chil dren, 7 to 13 years old, were given a serial recall task, a test of la nguage proficiency (the Language Proficiency Profile-I), and a rapid a utomatized naming (RAN) task. Similar to previous studies, when the da ta were examined by age, an apparent developmental lag was observed in the children's spontaneous use of a cumulative rehearsal strategy. Lo gistic regression analyses further demonstrated that age was actually a nonsignificant predictor of rehearsal use, but that both language pr oficiency and the automatization of language skills were highly signif icant predictors. In subsequent hierarchical analyses, automatized lan guage was a partial mediator of the language proficiency --> rehearsal use relation. These results provided support for the view that automa tization of language skills is an important and perhaps necessary cont ribution to the relation between language proficiency and rehearsal us e, but that other additional aspects of language proficiency also affe ct the child's use of a strategy. These findings were discussed in rel ation to Cummins' (1984) model of language proficiency. (C) 1998 Acade mic Press.