PHONICS WITHOUT SOUND: READING ACQUISITION IN THE CONGENITALLY DEAF

Extensive evidence supports the view that reading acquisition is dependent upon the mapping between spelling (orthography) and sound (phonics) (see Gleitman & Rozin 1977 for a review). There exists one population for whom this spelling to sound correspondence is naturally dissociated, the congenitally deaf. Reading and writing are essential modes of communication for this group. Yet, few achieve better than a third grade reading level (Wrightston et al., 1963); a fact which is predictable on theoretical grounds.;Twenty-six second generation deaf students were studied to investigate how they naturally approach the reading task, i.e., to investigate whether they do employ a manual "phonics." Specifically, the research posed two questions: (1)Do the deaf transform (decode or recode) print into an alternate "phonics" mode? (2)Can the deaf transform print into an alternate phonics? The second question is a composite of two further issues: (a)Are the deaf students competent metalinguists? (Can they segment their language to the level of fingerspelled handshapes that will map directly onto alphabetic letters?); and (b)can the deaf actually perform the mapping from segmented handshapes onto letters? These two processes, segmentation and mapping jointly define the conditions for decoding print.;Results from seven studies of congenitally deaf students (age range 4 - 16 years; reading level range pre-primer - 6th grade; with most of the readers congregated at the 3rd grade reading level or below) fail to yield any evidence that they naturally decode print into a phonics based form. The students are overwhelmingly capable, however, of creating a manual "phonics"--of segmenting to handshape and of mapping handshapes onto letters. Further, inducement of the fingerspelled decoding does seem to benefit a majority of the readers. A detailed presentation of these results and possible explanations for why the deaf do not exercise their phonic capabilities are discussed at length in this thesis.;Phonics without sound is an attempt to learn whether the deaf compensate for the lack of spelling-sound rules by creating an alternative route to phonics. Fingerspelling, a segment of the American Sign Language which provides a one to one mapping between handshape and alphabetic letter, may provide that alternative.