| As a favored study field of psycholinguistics, cognitive sciences and artificial intelligence, much about discourse comprehension remains unexplored. Preliminary research about individual differences pertaining to discourse comprehension has offered valuable clues, but special individuals' difference in this respect keeps untouched. It's of great practical and theoretical significance to delve into the nature of deaf students' trouble in reading so that we might solve this urgent problem in special education fields concerning deaf students. The present research finds its way right here to explore cognitively the reasons why deaf students' show mean comprehension in reading. The present author mainly bases her paper on the updated discourse comprehension theory for a comparison between careful subdivisions of the processing models and processing results in reading of prelingual deaf students and hearing students respectively, keeping it in mind that the research is swerving from text-based study to situational models investigation. Methodologically, the author combines on-line research and off-line question-answering, taking the average reading comprehension of Chinese discourses taught in school as the selective standards for hearing control group.The initial part provides a research framework founded on a general retrospective study about discourse comprehension of hearing students and deaf ones. The author also points out the prospective investigation direction and problems concerning deaf students' reading here.The second part is a six-experiment research of which the first one, with time-limited experimental materials, uses prime technique to compare the processing model and results in sentence representation of prelingual deaf students and hearing students 3 grades beneath. It demonstrates that the same processing model is shared by the two groups in sentence representation, but the experiment group display distinct differences in processing results.Experiment 2 and 3 apply self-paced press-response technique to explore the variation of the two groups in local coherence and global coherence and find no significant unlikeness.The forth and fifth experiments utilize such as press-response technique and eye-tracking method as well as the off-line of comprehension questions answering in an attempt to distinguish the two groups' processing models and abilities in global coherence with background-knowledge, their storage of evident information, theirestablishment of local coherence and inhibition of irrelevant information. The same processing model is detected in global coherence; no apparent variation appears in local coherence and global coherence between the two groups, only at the cost of longer time consumed of the experiment group; the control group is superior to its counterpart in inhibition of irrelevant information; the groups concerned show no dissimilarity in fixation duration, fixation frequency and saccade distance but the experiment group do exhibit a remarkably higher frequency in fixation and regression.Experiment 6 implements probe technique to compare the processing models and results in background information activation of prelingual deaf students and hearing students 4 grades below hi the hope of accounting for the defects indicated by the higher frequency of fixation and regression discovered in the above experiment. The conclusion argues that prelingual deaf students show apparent inferiority to hearing students 4 grades below in background information activation.In conclusion, the range of experiments in this paper demonstrate that prelingual deaf students share the same processing model in sentence representation, local coherence and global coherence with hearing students 3 grades below, but it takes the former more time to achieve equal results. In addition, though no variation turns up concerning processing model in background information activation, the experiment group is far more inferior to hearing students 4 grades beneath in processing results. It's evident...
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