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Negative encoding in alanguage retarded groupBarrie Dalgleish aa University of QueenslandPublished online: 06 Jul 2006.

To cite this article: Barrie Dalgleish (1977) Negative encoding in a language retardedgroup, The Exceptional Child, 24:3, 142-147, DOI: 10.1080/0156655770240303

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142 The Exceptional Child Vol. 24, No. 3 November, 1977

Negative encoding in a language retarded group

BARRIE DALGLEISH,University of Queensland

Abstract

Deaf children were presented with a pair of colours comprising a constantlypresented option and an occasionally presented option, and were trained alwaysto choose the latter. They were then required to transmit the solution of theproblem to a naive subject, under the conditions that they knew that thereceiver had the constant, wrong colour and one other colour which alteredbetween trials, but without knowing the identity of the other colour. Becausehe could only identify the wrong choice, the best solution for the transmitterwas to instruct the decoder not to choose the constantly presented colour. Thechoices made by naive receivers were no better than for subjects who lackedinstructions from transmitters who had previously learned not to choose theconstant colour. Only experienced receivers, those who had previously actedas transmitters, showed facilitation after repeated trials. A message analysisrevealed that negative items were not used. It was concluded that negativeforms were not fully integrated into the productive system of these children,and that the primacy of positives previously evident in comprehension hasnow been demonstrated in production.

Several experiments which have required the reader to demonstrate themeaning he attributes to sentences through his choice of external indiceshave appeared in the literature on language development. The techniqueof requiring the child to make true or false judgments about theappropriateness of drawings as illustrations of sentences has provensuitable for use with school-age children. Slobin (1966), working withnormal children, found that it was easier to make judgments of true thanfalse with affirmative sentences, but with negative sentences the order ofdifficulty was reversed. Dalgleish (1973) studied a group of language-retarded deaf children who were receiving an oral education, that is theywere instructed by spoken and written English, not by sign language orfingerspelling. Over an age range of from 7 to 11 years these childrencould correctly judge the validity of illustrations of simple, active,declarative sentences, but made erroneous judgments about negativesentences which they treated as positive.

The method of communication preferred by these children was gestureand signing, often with the addition of spoken or mouthed words. Signsfor yes and no were well known and were frequently used in responseto questions. Other studies have confirmed that mixed-media utterancesare frequently used by deaf children of this age (for example, Tervoort

Barrie Dalgleish, Ph.D., is Lecturer in Psychology, University of Queensland, St. Lucia4067, Australia.

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Negative encoding in a language retarded group 143

& Verbeck., 1967). Accordingly, an experiment was designed to investigatewhether such children were able to integrate a negative gestural elementinto a spoken message.

Previous research had established that it was possible to control theencoding medium which the children would select by means of theattributes of the stimulus array to be encoded (Dalgleish, 1973). Signlanguages incorporate two representational principles, imitation andpointing. In highly developed systems such as American Sign Language(ASL) other means have been devised to encode aspects of referents whichcannot be imitated readily, and which may be ambiguous if designatedby pointing. Color is a primary example of such an attribute. ASL colorsigns have an orthographic basis, being constructed from a root which isthe first letter of the color name when spelled by the fingerspellingalphabet. Orally educated children whose manual communications arerestricted to non-linguistic gestures and private language signs usuallyinsert spoken color words instead of pointing or resorting to arbitraryneologisms.

In the following experiment we considered whether deaf children werecapable of formulating a negative message about color by placing themin a two-choice situation in which they were aware of the wrong choice,and therefore could indicate the right choice by a message correspondingto the logical form b not a. That is, where b is a class of colored circleswhich is composed of the elements a, colors which could be correct choices,and a' a color which was not correct, could a be communicated as wellas a?

Method

Prior to this experiment all the subjects were engaged in two sessions ofsending and receiving messages which were aimed at identifying combina-tions of colors and shapes. Therefore they were experienced in formulatingpositive messages containing both gestural and spoken elements. Since thevariable stimulus attribute in the present experiment was color, it wasanticipated that spoken words would be basic to all messages.

Design

The experiment comprised two phases, a learning phase (A) and acommunication phase (B). During Phase A each child learned individuallythat in a two-choice situation the correct choice was never the color whichwas presented on each trial. The learning criterion was ten successivecorrect choices. During Phase B each subject had to devise a message tohelp another make a correct selection, knowing only which was the wrongchoice. Half the subjects, the naive group, did not receive instruction in

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144 Barrie Dalgleish

Phase A until they had acted as decoders in Phase B. Since there mayhave been transfer of the principle between phases, there was only onecrucial trial for the experienced group during Phase B, but for the sakeof comparison all subjects were given five trials during this phase.

Materials

A pack of clear plastic cards, each mounted with a circle in the center,was used. The upper surface of the circles was colored red, green, blue,yellow, purple, black or white, all of which could be named by the subjects.The under surfaces, which could be seen through the plastic, were white.Each card had a smaller adhesive circle concentric to the large circle onthe under surface. These markers were blue except for the constantlypresented card which was white.

Procedure

In Phase A each child was given two cards with differently colored circlesand was required to guess which card had a blue marker underneath.One colored circle which was presented on every trial was never correct,whilst any occurrence of the remaining six colors was always correct. Thechild learned if he was correct by turning over the card of his choice toexpose the blue marker.

Phase B was preceded by several refresher trials of the Phase Aprocedure, which were given to the encoder alone. The subjects were thenseated facing one another at opposite ends of a table, separated by a lowscreen. The experimenter and a translator sat opposite each other adjacentto the screen. The encoder was instructed that he had to tell his partnerunder which card lay the blue marker. He was told that he could usegesture and speech. '•:.••'•'.. '

The experimenter then removed the constantly presented color from infront of the encoder and passed it to the decoder together with anothercolor selected at random from the pack. The encoder both saw and wastold that the constant color and one other were being given to the decoder,but he did not know the color of the second card or the order in whichthe cards were placed before the decoder;

After the encoder had sent his message the decoder verified his selectionby inspecting the underside for the blue marker. Two measures, a verbatimrecord of the message and the decoder's choice, were taken.

Subjects

Twenty eight profoundly deaf children, with no other handicaps, who wereattending oral schools for the deaf in inner London, participated. All hadhearing losses, exceeding 80 decibels in the better ear. Their mean hearing

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Negative encoding in a language retarded group 145

loss over the speech frequencies was 85.61 decibels. Their ages rangedfrom 8.0 to 11.9 years, with the mean at 10.5 years. Almost all werepaired with a child of the same sex from the same class during PhaseB.

Results

Phase A

As the data for the first five trials which are presented in Table 1 indicate,both groups quickly learned the principle governing the correct choice.The success rate rose from the chance level on Trial 1 to peifectperformance on Trial 3. The average number of trials per subject to meetthe learning criterion was 14.22. The speed with which the problem wassolved indicates that the subjects were not learning that each of the variablypresented colors was correct, but that the constantly presented color wasincorrect.

Table 1. Correct choices per trial for naive and experienced decoders duringPhases A and B

Trial

12345All trials

NaivePhase A

88

14141458

groupPhase B

898

101045

Experienced groupPhase A

78

14131456

Phase B

91214131462

Phase B

Table 1 reveals that no difference was observed when the correct choiceson the first trial of the communication phase were compared with thoseof the learning phase. The experienced group showed the larger difference,but this was not statistically significant (%2 = 2.00, p > .05). Differencesin the performance of the two groups appeared on the subsequent trials.The experienced group were marginally better at making correct choicesthan they had been on Trials 2 and 3 of the learning phase, but the naivegroup failed to meet their later level of performance achieved on thelearning phase, even after five trials. The differences between the groups'responses for Trials 2 to 5 of the communication phase proved statisticallysignificant (x2 = 5.34, .05 > p > .01).

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146 Barrie Dalgleish

In order to clarify the poor performance of both groups on the firstcommunication trial and the subsequent differences between the groups,the messages were examined and classified as shown in Table 2.

Table 2. Percentages of four types of messages for the first and all communicationtrials

Group First trial All trials(percentages) (percentages)

message messageA B C D A B C D

Naive 21.43 35.71 7.14 35.71 12.86 45.71 10.00 31.43Experienced 28.57 21.43 7.14 42.87 17.11 17.11 15.78 50.00•Means 25.00 28.57 7.14 39.29 15.00 31.42 12.86 40.71

At no stage was any message of negative content passed. Four typesof message were observed.

Type A messages were lists of colors occurring in the set. The strategywas to name all the colors, except the constant, until one of the colorswas found to correspond to the decoder's variable card. This was the mosteffective strategy observed being the only type of message which led directlyto the correct solution by virtue of the information conveyed. It was usedby five of the fourteen pairs, and was more favored by the experiencedgroup. Nevertheless by comparison with a negative message the techniqueis slow and cumbersome, and strained the encoder's memory for the colorrange. It could also lead to incorrect solutions because as the colors becamemore difficult to list, the encoder was in danger of including the constantcolor.

Type B responses consisted of a single guess. The receiver had to learnto ignore these messages and make his own independent guess. All pairsand all but three subjects used this technique, which was particularlypopular with the naive group.

Type C responses were defined as messages in which the constantstimulus was named, without any negative marker to indicate that it wasthe incorrect choice. This initially led to wrong choices, but subjects whoreceived several misleading messages usually learned to select the unnamedcolor. This technique was not widely used, and represented the leastfrequent of those tabled here.

Type D messages were the most primitive responses to the problem.They consisted of telling the decoder to select the card with the blue markerunderneath, without giving any information to guide this choice. Suchmessages were very common, and most often appeared to be born out of

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Negative encoding in a language retarded group 147

desperation. However, the response persisted in some encoders despite anadditional instruction to tell the partner about the big circle to be turnedover.

Discussion

This experiment has demonstrated the primacy of positive over negativecoding in the production of utterances. The experienced subjects learnedthat most of their own messages were either misleading or irrelevant. Thosewho had used Type B or C responses when acting as encoders mightbe predisposed at the earliest stages of the communication phase todisregard the information received. The naive group required more trialsto reach the same conclusion, and if Type A or B messages sometimesproduced correct solutions, they might continue to be misled by B andC messages.

It is clear that these children were not able to introduce a gesturednegative into their spoken messages, despite their frequent production ofmulti-media utterances and their use of negative gestures in response toquestions. They were like young hearing children who have not integratednegatives into their language processing, and consequently do notdifferentiate utterances containing negatives from positive declarations.

It may be that integration of a negative gesture into a different languagesystem is a more difficult task than insertion of negatives into a firstlanguage. Experiments designed to elicit gestural messages would be usefulin investigating this. Instruction in the use of gestures to negate spokenpositives may, however, prove a useful preliminary for teaching thenegative syntactic system of English to deaf children.

References

Dalgleish, B.W.J. Some symbolic and linguistic processes in deaf children. Unpublisheddoctoral dissertation, University of London, 1973.

Slobin, D. I. Grammatical transformations and sentence comprehension in childhood andadulthood. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1966, 5, 219-227.

Tervoort, B. T., & Verbeck, A. J. A. Analysis of communicative structure patterns indeaf children. Vocational Rehabilitation Administration Project RO467-64-65.Groningen, Onderzock, 1967.

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