Prior studies have often confounded linguistic and perceptual performance when evaluating deaf subjects' skills, a confusion that may be responsible for results indicating lesser recall ability among the deaf. In this series of studies this linguistic/perceptual confound was investigated in both the iconic and short term memory of deaf individuals. Initially iconic memory was investigated using both familiar and unfamiliar stimuli. Results showed that deaf subjects (n=8) did not have deficits in visual perceptual abilities but had deficits in their linguistic skills. Deaf subjects also showed a practice effect with the familiar stimuli, an effect not found among the hearing subjects (n=8). In a serial position recall task deaf subjects were found to have lower levels of recall at all of the serial positions than did hearing subjects. Deaf subjects also did not show a significant recency effect. While results show that deaf and hearing subjects have comparable levels of skill in their visual information processing strategies, it would appear that the two groups use different kinds of input strategies that may not be optimally suited for recall of sequential information. (Author/PB)