Two lexical decision experiments are reported that investigate whether the same segmentation strategies are used for reading printed English words and fingerspelled words (in American Sign Language). Experiment 1 revealed that both deaf and hearing readers performed better when written words were segmented with respect to an orthographically…

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between the variables of reading motivation, reading amount, and text comprehension in deaf and hearing adults. Research has shown that less than 50% of deaf students leave high school reading at or above a fourth-grade level (Allen, 1994). Our question is, how does this affect the levels of…

The main objective of this study was to unveil similarities and differences in the word reading strategies of orally raised individuals with prelingual deafness and hearing individuals. Relevant data were gathered by a computerized research paradigm asking participants to make rapid same/different judgments for words. There were three distinct…

Deaf students consistently score lower on standardized measures of reading comprehension than their hearing peers. Most of the studies that have been conducted to explain this phenomenon have focused on variables within the reader, and important differences have been found between deaf and hearing readers. More recently, in the face of…

Reading fluency in deaf children whose primary mode of communication is visual, whether English-like or American Sign Language, is difficult to measure since most measures of fluency require a child to read aloud. This article opens the discussion of a new construct, namely, signed reading fluency (i.e., rendering of printed text in a visually…

This article examines the role of mode of acquisition (MoA) of word meanings in reading comprehension: children acquire word meanings using perceptual information (e.g., hearing, seeing, or smelling the referent) and/or linguistic information (e.g., verbal explanations). A total of 72 deaf and 99 hearing children between 7 and 15 years of age…

The reading comprehension and visual word recognition in 50 deaf children and adolescents with at least 3 years of cochlear implant (CI) use were evaluated. Their skills were contrasted with reference data of 500 deaf children without CIs. The reading comprehension level in children with CIs was expected to surpass that in deaf children without…

Nine children with severe-profound prelingual hearing loss and single-word reading scores not more than 10 months behind chronological age (Good Readers) were matched with 9 children whose reading lag was at least 15 months (Poor Readers). Good Readers had significantly higher spelling and reading comprehension scores. They produced significantly…