Professor Morford says signers are like English learners whose first language uses a different alphabet.
莫福德说,手语使用者就像是那些第一语言字母表和英语不同的英语学习者。
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."
莫福德:“任何人,如果其第一语言的书写体系和英语有很大不同,像阿拉伯语、汉语或俄语这些语言。他们就会知道,学习英语比学习使用相同正字法(orthography)的语言更具挑战性。”
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.
正字法是一种语言的书写体系和拼写规则。当然,就手语使用者来说,他们的第一语言根本就没有书写体系,只有手势。加劳德特大学的汤姆·艾伦教授(Tom Allen)解释了这对阅读的影响。
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 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."
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
艾伦:“手语使用者不是在处理听觉在大脑中的呈现。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。”