Testing Anglophones on French Signs

The author sets out to determine in what mode of testing immediately following the presentation of French object nouns would Anglophone high school students perform best. He assessed 192 volunteer students (94 males and 98 females) from Malcolm Campbell High School in Montreal, stratified into three levels of intellectual ability and randomly assigned to eight conditions. Each group was presented with French sign-type information through single or multiple sense modalities and tested with immediate post-test recognition tasks. The author explains that sign-type information is an elaborate approach to the classification of visual and aural stimuli. His results showed that (a) a superiority for short-term concept recognition existed when the visual modality was used to test either single- or multiple-channel information, thus contradicting the cue summation hypothesis of learning; (b) line drawings (an example of visual sign-type) were recognized significantly better than printed words (also visual), which in turn were recognized significantly better than spoken words; (c) recognition of spoken words in a list produced results which were as poor as those obtained in more complex reading comprehension tasks, and both of these results were significantly poorer than those obtained from any other condition, post-test. In addition, (d) positive correlation existed between IQ level and post-test performance; and (e) there were no significant differences among ages or between sexes on any post-test.

Master's Thesis

McGill University

Montreal

1978

vii-104p.

en