The instantiation of general terms by deaf adolescents/adults

Two studies were conducted using severely and profoundly deaf high school students to determine their ability to instantiate particular exemplars of general nouns and to use those instantiations as retrieval cues. The results indicated that the deaf adolescents/adults could instantiate when asked to do so but did not do so spontaneously; sentence recall was best when the retrieval cue matched the word used in the original sentence; and recall of sentences in which all information was explicit was better than of sentences in which some information had to be inferred. Impoverished semantic representations, difficulty in integrating semantic representations, and insufficient strategy use were suggested as possible alternative and competing explanations for the obtained results.