This study addressed visual word recognition in deaf bilinguals who are proficient in German Sign Language (DGS) and German. The study specifically investigated whether DGS signs are activated during a monolingual German word recognition task despite the lack of similarity in German orthographic representations and DGS phonological representations. Deaf DGS-German bilinguals saw pairs of German words and decided whether the words were semantically related. Half of the experimental items had phonologically related translation equivalents in DGS. Participants were slower to reject semantically unrelated word pairs when the translation equivalents were phonologically related in DGS than when the DGS translations were phonologically unrelated. However, this was not the case in Turkish-German hearing bilinguals who do not have sign language knowledge. The results indicate that lexical representations are associated cross-linguistically in the bilingual lexicon irrespective of their orthographic or phonological form. Implications of these results for reading development in deaf German bilinguals are discussed.

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This study aims to enhance understanding of the factors underlying variance in the reading comprehension skills of prelingually deaf individuals. Participants were 213 sixth through tenth graders with prelingual deafness recruited from four orthographic backgrounds (Hebrew, Arabic, English, and German) and allocated to three distinct reading profiles (levels). A sentence comprehension test manipulating the semantic plausibility of sentences and a word processing experiment requiring rapid determination of the semantic relationship between two real words or between a real word and a pseudohomophonic letter string were used to determine the factors distinguishing skilled from less skilled deaf readers. Findings point to deficits in structural (syntactic) knowledge and deficient knowledge structures, rather than differences in phonological processing skills, as making that distinction. Moreover, the acquisition of such knowledge seems to be modified by particularities of the read orthography.

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