The feeling of knowing in deaf adolescents

Forty prelingually deaf high school students were asked to define words from the 1981 Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). The students then ranked the words they had missed in terms of the difficulty they would expect to have in picking out a picture of the word; that is, they were asked to judge their "feeling of knowing" for the missed words. The PPVT was then given to the students and served as a measure of accuracy for their rank-order judgments. Two comparison groups were established: one was a group of hearing adolescents of the same age as the deaf students, and the second was a group of hearing students of the same reading level as the deaf students. The deaf students were unable to judge their feeling of knowing, but both hearing groups were able to do so.