| The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate whether the well-documented difficulties that deaf children encounter in learning to read may arise from underlying deficits in the accuracy and the segmental organization of the phonological representations of words in their mental lexicons. The study attempted to address the issue of representational quality by investigating (a) awareness of phonological structure at three levels of linguistic complexity: syllable, rhyme and phoneme in children and adolescents with a severe to profound, prelingual hearing loss, (b) the extent to which matching judgments across the phonological awareness tasks are influenced by the perceptual status (acoustic, tactile, visual) of distracter items, and (c) whether age and/or reading ability would differentially affect the performance of deaf children and adolescents on the phonological awareness tasks. Using a within subjects design, three phonological awareness tasks were administered to 52 children (ages 6-19 years) attending two provincial schools for the Deaf in Western Canada. Performance accuracy was analysed at each level of phonological structure and compared across stimulus conditions using repeated measures ANOVA. Insensitivity to phonological structure was observed at all three levels of linguistic structure in the presence of average IQ, across all ages and within good and poor reader groups. Moreover, the data revealed that the ability to make syllable, rhyme and phoneme level judgements may not be tied to 'phonological' facilitation as it is with hearing learners. The study's findings are inconsistent with the conventional 'qualitatively similar' hypothesis that the cognitive processes supporting reading acquisition are similar in deaf and hearing individuals. |
