Jm. Bebko et al., LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY AND THE PREDICTION OF SPONTANEOUS REHEARSAL IN CHILDREN WHO ARE DEAF, Journal of experimental child psychology, 68(1), 1998, pp. 51-69
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.