From symbol to meaning: Processing skills and literacy development in deaf students

The impact of deafness on literacy development has been well documented. Studies have consistently indicated that the average deaf reader enters adulthood with a third-to-fourth grade reading level. Such reading levels are not surprising given the importance of sound to the reading process. There is much evidence that deaf readers have difficulty developing the very skills important to reading success: phonological processing and sequential memory. There are however, many deaf individuals who are competent readers. The skills of these readers are of particular interest when examining the correlates of literacy in the deaf population. In this study, the importance of phonological processing and sequential memory skills for reading comprehension was examined. Other correlates, whose importance to deaf readers has been either demonstrated or hypothesized, were investigated. These factors include manual and orthographic encoding, non-verbal intelligence and speech clarity.;The subjects were 26 profoundly deaf students in two age groups: 13-14 year olds and 18-19 year olds. A series of word recall tasks was administered which reflected a student's use of encoding strategies. Each group of word lists was similar either phonologically, in sign formation, or orthographically. A performance decrement in the recall of these experimental lists when compared to their matched control lists indicates interference and suggests encoding along the measured dimension. Also examined was the subject's overall recall accuracy on the presented lists. Phonological awareness was evaluated by the administration of two rhyming tasks, a forced choice task and a rhyme generation task. The Matrix Analogies Test was used as a measure of general non-verbal cognitive ability. Reading achievement was measured by the Reading Comprehension subtest of the Peabody Individual Achievement Test - Revised.;The results of the study support the hypothesis that phonological encoding and sequential memory skills play important roles in the development of reading skills in deaf students. These findings support hypotheses regarding similarities in the reading process for deaf and hearing students. The interpretation of these results emphasizes the importance of phonological skills and sequential memory in the reading process for deaf students with implications for instruction and research.