College Students’ Perceptions of the C-Print Speech-to-Text Transcription System

C-Print is a real-time speech-to-text transcription system used as a support service with deaf students in mainstreamed classes. Questionnaires were administered to 36 college students in 32 courses in which the C-Print system was used in addition to interpreting and notetaking. Twenty-two of these students were also interviewed. Questionnaire items included student ratings of lecture comprehension. Student ratings indicated good comprehension with C-Print, and the mean rating was significantly higher than that for understanding of the interpreter. Students also rated the hard-copy printout provided by C-Print as helpful, and they reported that they used these notes more frequently than the handwritten notes from a paid student notetaker. Interview results were consistent with those for the questionnaire. Questionnaire and interview responses regarding use of C-Print as the only support service indicated that this arrangement would be acceptable to many students, but that it would not be to others. Communication characteristics were related to responses to the questionnaire. Students who were relatively proficient in reading and writing English, and in speech-reading, responded more favorably to C-Print

Theory of Mind in Deaf Adults and the Organization of Verbs of Knowing

Naive theories of mind provide an organizing scheme for concept formation and categorization. Additionally, they highlight what is important within a domain. This study investigated how deaf adults with hearing parents organize 17 cognitive verbs of knowing as a way of describing their naive theory of mind. Deaf adults rated on a 1 to 7 scale the similarity of pairs of cognitive verbs in terms of whether "the words are alike or different based on how you would use your mind when you do that mental activity. " We directly compared the similarity of cognitive verbs in these deaf adults with data collected in earlier research describing the organization of cognitive verbs in hearing adults. We conducted multidimensional scaling, additive similarity tree, and Pathfinder analyses to assess global, categorical, and local relations in the domain. Deaf adults ' theory of mind revealed a distinction among mental verbs in terms of information-processing components and constructive certainty components. In all analyses, the deaf group showed a very similar organization to that of hearing adults examined in previous research. We conclude that, although deaf adults might be expected to view cognitive processes differently than hearing adults, they nonetheless exhibit a theory of mind that is highly similar to that of hearing adults. Naive theories of mind are likely to be important in guiding daily activities and in the production of strategic behavior (dark, 1987). One's naive theory of mind represents one's ideas about how the mind operates and how one knows or comes to know something