This study compared the organization of verbal concept knowledge in deaf and hearing adults. Such organization has been shown to influence performance by hearing adults on language and memory tasks, but comparisons of deaf and hearing individuals' mental lexicons have not been conducted. A semantic association task was used to estimate the mental lexicons of deaf and hearing adults for a sample of words that were either sound related or not sound related. Estimates of the size of the associative set for a given word and the strength of the relationship between the word and its associates were computed. The associative sets of deaf and hearing adults varied in the coherence and accessibility of the lexical concepts but showed generally high agreement in the strengths of the relationships within the associative sets. Observed similarities and differences between deaf and hearing adults were comparable for sound-related and not-sound-related words.
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McEvoy et al. (1999) studied this question.
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