Reading skills of deaf adults who sign: Good and poor readers compared

Functional literacy is difficult to achieve for the deaf population. Sixty percent of deaf high school students read at or below grade four, eight percent read at or above grade eight. The present study investigated two factors that may contribute to these individual differences in reading achievement in the deaf signing population: signed language comprehension skills and word recognition skills. In Study 1, 31 deaf adults (12 women and 19 men) between the ages of 17 and 54 years were categorized as either a Good Reader or Poor Reader to determine what factors would differentiate them. These groups were tested with a battery of background questionnaires, speech use and comprehension, communication, hearing, nonverbal IQ measures, three signed language measures, and two reading tests. Results showed that the Good and Poor Readers differed significantly on signed language comprehension skills. The Poor Readers (mean reading level grade 3.5) had poor sign language comprehension and the Good Readers (mean reading level grade 10.5) had good sign language comprehension.;In Study 2, the Good and Poor Readers tested in Study 1 and a hearing control group (6 women and 8 men) were tested on three lexical decision tasks. Two tasks tested use of phonology in word recognition (spelling-sound correspondence, pseudohomophone tasks) and a third task tested use of sign lexical knowledge (signability task). Across all tasks, the deaf Good Readers were as fast and as accurate as the Hearing Readers, whereas the Poor Readers were slower and made more errors than the other groups. The Poor Readers displayed similar patterns of performance to the Good Readers on the spelling-sound and pseudohomophone tasks. Neither deaf group showed much evidence of using phonological processing whereas the hearing control group did. The Poor Readers showed evidence of using sign lexical knowledge on the signability task.;These results together suggest that underdeveloped signed language skills may be a more important factor in the low reading levels of the deaf signing population than word recognition skills.