Factors Distinguishing Skilled and Less Skilled Deaf Readers: Evidence From Four Orthographies

Abstract

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.

Visual sign phonology: insights into human reading and language from a natural soundless phonology

“…This causes their ASL phonological skills to remain weak and nonnative despite having many years to develop abilities in ASL. Furthermore, deaf signers from deaf parents are more than twice as likely to be skilled readers than deaf signers from hearing parents . Together, this predicts that late exposed signers will have weaker reading skills than early signers because their weaker phonological segmentation abilities impede reading processes.…”

The Development of Antonym Knowledge in American Sign Language (ASL) and Its Relationship to Reading Comprehension in English

“…Good ASL skills correlate with L2 reading comprehension (Chamberlain & Mayberry, 2000;Hermans, Ormel, & Knoors, 2010;Hoffmeister, 2000;Lichtenstein, 1998;Miller et al, 2012;Strong & Prinz, 1997). A growing literature examines how ability in vocabulary, syntax, and phonology influences reading comprehension, as described in the next section.…”

“…Syntactic knowledge also predicts reading comprehension (Chamberlain & Mayberry, 2008;Miller et al, 2012). For example, Chamberlain and Mayberry (2008) found that skilled deaf adult readers of English scored higher on a test of ASL syntax.…”

“…Notes 1 For example, negated antonyms: "That's not making it clean, that's making it dirty," versus coordinated antonyms: "They're winter shoes that you can wear outside or inside." 2 For example: lexical decision of words and pseudo words (Miller et al, 2012;Mayberry et al, 2011), picture matching of words that match on the level of phoneme and rhyme, word recall of rhyming versus non-rhyming words, manipulating sounds and blending syllables (Mayberry et al, 2011). 3 It is important to note that signs do not prevent auditory speech perception (and related phonological abilities) when this modality is available for deaf readers as in the case of children who successfully use cochlear implants or hearing aids.…”

“…For example: lexical decision of words and pseudo words (Miller et al., ; Mayberry et al., ), picture matching of words that match on the level of phoneme and rhyme, word recall of rhyming versus non‐rhyming words, manipulating sounds and blending syllables (Mayberry et al., ).…”