Journal of Research in Reading, ISSN 0141-0423
Volume 20, Issue 2, 1997, pp 105±121
The prelingually deaf young reader:
A case of reliance on direct lexical
access?
John R. Beech, University of Leicester, and
Margaret Harris, Royal Holloway University of London
ABSTRACT
A comparison was made between prelingually deaf and hearing children matched on
reading age (between 7:0 and 7:11 years) in order to examine possible differences in
reading performance. The deaf children all had a severe or profound hearing loss and
were receiving special education in either a school or a unit for the deaf. The
experimental tasks used a lexical decision task involving the reading of single words.
The employment of phonology in reading was investigated by comparing reading
performance on regular and irregular words and by comparing reading of
homophonic versus non-homophonic nonwords. Both tasks revealed that hearing
participants were much more affected by regularity and homophony, suggesting a
much greater reliance on assembled phonological recoding. These results are
discussed in terms of deaf readers relying on lexical access for reading print.
REÂSUMEÂ
Le jeune lecteur sourd de naissance : un cas de soutien aÁ l'acceÁs direct au lexique ?
Les lecteurs ordinaires apprennent les relations entre les lettres et les phoneÁmes
correspondants, ce qui leur permet de chercher aÁ prononcer des combinaisons nouvelles de lettres. L'enfant sourd de naissance, seÂveÁre ou profond, a des connaissances
phonologiques si limiteÂes qu'il est treÁs handicape pour pouvoir suivre cette voie. Par
conseÂquent, si les enfants sourds lisent c'est probablement en suivant des voies
diffeÂrentes.
On a fait une comparaison entre des enfants sourds de naissance et des enfants
entendants apparieÂs par l'aÃge de lecture (de 7.0 aÁ 7.11 ans) afin d'examiner leurs
diffeÂrences possibles de reÂsultats en lecture. L'aÃge chronologique moyen des enfants
sourds eÂtait de 9.9 ans et celui des enfants entendants de 7.3 ans. Les enfants sourds
avaient tous une perte d'audition seÂveÁre ou profonde et recevaient un enseignement
speÂcialise dans une eÂcole ou une unite particulieÁre pour enfants sourds. Les taÃches
expeÂrimentales ont utilise une taÃche de deÂcision lexicale comportant la lecture de
# United Kingdom Reading Association 1997. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road,
Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
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BEECH AND HARRIS
mots isoleÂs. Le recours aÁ la phonologie dans la lecture a eÂte eÂtudie en comparant les
reÂsultats dans la lecture de mots reÂguliers et irreÂguliers et en comparant la lecture de
non-mots, homophones et non-homophone de mots anglais (par exemple, werd vs
somo). Les deux taÃches comportaient des classifications de cartes en mots existants et
non existants. Les non-mots ont eÂte construits de facËon aÁ ce qu'ils aient un maximum
de similitude visuelle et qu'il soit donc difficile de suivre la voie lexicale pour opeÂrer la
discrimination entre mot et non-mot.
Les deux taÃches ont reÂveÂle que les participants sourds sont beaucoup plus affecteÂs
par la reÂgularite et l'homophonie, ce qui suggeÁre un appui beaucoup plus grand sur le
recodage phonologique. De plus, le premier tiers de lecteurs sourds a un QI non
verbal significativement plus eÂleve que le dernier tiers, mais ils ne sont pas diffeÂrents
par ailleurs.
La discussion des principaux reÂsultats s'effectue en termes d'appui des lecteurs
sourds sur l'acceÁs lexical lors de la lecture et du recours beaucoup plus large des
lecteurs entendants au recodage phonologique lors de la lecture de mots isoleÂs. Dans
le cas des sourds, il y a probablement activation directe du sens des mots aÁ partir d'un
traitement des lettres, ce qui n'interdit pas l'eÂventualite d'une activation paralleÁle de
processus repreÂsentationnels lieÂs aux signes. Un de nos reÂsultats montre que trois des
quatre sourds de notre eÂchantillon qui signent depuis leur naissance (ils ont eÂte eÂleveÂs
dans la langue des signes par des parents sourds qui signent) font partie des sept
meilleurs des 36 enfants sourds en termes de quotient de lecture. Le meilleur lecteur
de l'eÂchantillon est un de ces quatre sourds. Le quatrieÁme sourd qui signe depuis la
naissance a eu une scolarite interrompue, mais se trouve pourtant au milieu du
classement. On peut supposer que les enfants qui signent depuis la naissance
deÂveloppent un reÂseau de langage plus riche par suite de leur expeÂrience preÂcoce des
signes.
Enfin, la plupart des enfants sourds de notre eÂchantillon ne progressent pas en
lecture aÁ la mme vitesse que leurs cadets entendants. Une des raisons eÂventuelles de
leurs difficulteÂs en lecture est l'absence ou l'appauvrissement d'une voie sublexicale
qui leur donnerait des moyens alternatifs pour lire des mots non familiers quand la
voie lexicale ne marche pas.
INTRODUCTION
There is clear evidence that people who have a severe or profound prelingual hearing
loss experience great difficulty learning to read (e.g. Conrad, 1979; Wood, Wood,
Griffiths and Howarth, 1986, in the UK; Kampfe and Turecheck, 1987; Trybus and
Karchmer, 1977, in the USA). Although various factors are implicated, a major
source of difficulty for many deaf readers is impoverished phonological knowledge.
Children with normal hearing usually learn to read alphabetic scripts by establishing
relationships between their familiar spoken lexicon and unfamiliar printed words.
During this time they also develop a facility for reading unfamiliar words by translating letters to sounds. For instance, there is evidence that hearing children who
learn connections between letters and their corresponding phonemes make better
progress than others who are less skilful (e.g. Bradley and Bryant, 1983; Stuart and
Coltheart, 1988). An ability to translate letters to sound allows the child to sustain
reading for longer, which in turn develops both skill and motivation. This kind of
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strategy is very much more difficult for the severely or profoundly and prelingually
deaf child to develop. This is because, for the majority of such children, phonological
knowledge is very poor in comparison to that of a hearing child and so does not
provide an adequate basis from which to develop a phonologically-based route for
reading.
Before considering the implications of this claim it is important to note that some
authors have suggested that deaf children are able to develop a phonological code
through lip-reading (Dodd, 1976; Dodd and Hermelin, 1977) and a study by
Campbell (1991) has provided evidence that prelingually deaf adolescents make use
of a form of inner speech that had phonological characteristics. Campbell (1991) and
McDermed (1991) have also shown that deaf children sometimes make spelling
errors that are indicative of confusions that have arisen from lip reading (such as
spelling pillow as bleno and sponge as sponch). However, it is unlikely that lip reading
can provide a deaf child with an exact equivalent of the phonological knowledge of a
hearing child. In any case, studies of deaf adolescents do not reveal anything about
the extent to which phonological knowledge is available to a deaf child in the early
stages of learning to read.
In hearing children, phonological knowledge, in the sense of meta-phonological
knowledge, develops with reading ability (see Goswami and Bryant, 1990; Stuart and
Coltheart, 1988 for discussion of this issue), but it is open to question whether similar
processes may operate for the deaf child. Our own study of beginning deaf readers
(Harris and Beech, 1994) has shown that they perform very poorly on a picture
version of the Bradley and Bryant (1983) test of auditory organization which requires
judgments about the similarity of sounds in monosyllabic words.
Cases of reading development in the absence of a phonologically-based route have
been reported in the cognitive neuropsychology literature. (Two examples are
Campbell and Butterworth, 1985 and Funnell and Davison, 1989.) Although neither
study investigated the early stages of learning to read, the subject studied by Funnell
and Davison had significant problems in both reading and spelling while she was
at school (personal communication). It does seem possible to learn to read in the
absence of phonological mediation, but the absence of such a route could present the
child with serious problems. It is also relevant to point to studies of dyslexic children
(Hulme and Snowling, 1991; Wilding, 1990) that have identified a relationship
between lack of reading success and impaired performance on a variety of
phonological tasks.
Taken together these studies support the view that the deaf child will have great
difficulty in developing successful translation between letters and letter strings on the
one hand and phonemes or phoneme clusters on the other. This hypothesis is the
focus of the present paper and, if it were confirmed, would suggest that prelingually
deaf children have to learn to read by some other means.
In the initial phase of learning to read, hearing children normally develop a small
vocabulary of words that they can identify at sight. As each new word is encountered
and learned, its combination of visual features is differentiated from featural
representations of already learned words. Although words sharing common features
will often be confused (e.g. Beech, 1987; Seymour and Elder, 1986), this is generally
an efficient method of storage as in the initial phase there is no need to master a
completely accurate representation of the word. The main obvious difference
between the deaf and hearing reader in using such a lexical route is that the hearing
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BEECH AND HARRIS
reader can associate this representation with its corresponding vocal form, whereas
the deaf child probably cannot.
The precise nature of the deaf child's representations is difficult to specify.
Obviously, the signing or oral background of the child will be important as well
as such factors as residual hearing and level of communication skills. Thus
representations could be associated with a manual or visual representation of the sign
of the word, an impoverished phonological representation, some other representation, or some combination of these. The phonological representation could be
biased towards labial phonemes, based on lip reading; it may also be affected by level
of hearing difficulty, by articulatory feedback and by the reading process. Finger
spelling may also have a facilitatory role. As deaf children come from contrasting
backgrounds of oral, signing, or a combination, this will have a bearing on the nature
and diversity of their representations of words.
Following the initial phase of learning to read, children are often taught lettersound connections using phonics. In the UK this practice is now incorporated in
the National Curriculum. In many cases these correspondences are taught implicitly, for instance, when the child is stumbling on a word and the teacher prompts
with the initial phoneme. As already mentioned, there is evidence that if children
have phonological difficulties and are taught these correspondences, there is a
subsequent improvement in reading in comparison to a group given an equivalent
amount of irrelevant training (Bradley and Bryant, 1983). This implies that a
properly functioning sublexical route is a considerable asset to the developing reader
as it can help to sustain the reading of text (e.g. Jorm and Share, 1983; Stanovich,
1986).
There has been recent debate concerning the size of the unit of such a sublexical
route; for instance, Kirtley, Bryant, MacLean and Bradley (1989), Treiman and
Zukowski (1988) and Treiman, Goswami and Bruck (1990) provide support for
processing of units that are larger than single phonemes. The findings of such studies
challenge a simple grapheme-phoneme conversion model (e.g. Coltheart, 1978).
However, Patterson and Morton (1985) have suggested certain modifications to the
model in which readers have available grapheme-phoneme conversion and in
addition rules that include knowledge concerning the `bodies' of printed words.
Ehri (1991) has described a fluency stage of reading during the second stage of
reading in which reading becomes faster and more skilled. These skills involve
decoding unfamiliar words, becoming more automatic at reading known words and
co-ordinating the decoding of print with text comprehension more efficiently. If the
deaf reader is unable to operate a sublexical route effectively, this could impede
progress in reading and perhaps in vocabulary development.
In the present experiment two different methods were employed for comparing the
use of phonological coding in deaf and hearing readers with a reading age of 7 years.
Before enumerating the variables to be investigated it would be worth briefly
discussing the methodology involving the comparison of different groups matched
on reading level. Such comparisons have in the past produced some controversy (e.g.
Backman, Mamen, and Ferguson, 1984; Bryant and Goswami, 1986; Stanovich,
Nathan and Zolman, 1988). The argument has been that a lack of difference between
comparison groups is indicative of a developmental lag (e.g. Beech and Harding,
1984; Stanovich, Nathan and Zolman, 1988), whereas a difference in favour of
the normal, younger reader indicates some qualitative difference between the two
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groups (e.g. Beech and Awaida, 1991; Frith and Snowling, 1983; Olson et al., 1989;
Snowling, 1981). In the present study, finding differences between deaf and hearing
groups, matched on reading age, would be evidence for qualitative differences in
reading. A lack of difference would be more problematic for interpretation.
In the first method for examining phonological coding, differences in reading
regular and irregular words were examined using a lexical decision task involving
card sorting. If the reader translates letters to sounds, there ought to be more errors
in reading irregularly spelled words. This is because the phonological code that is
generated as a result of using the sublexical route on an irregular word will not be
retrievable from an auditory lexicon or will lead to the wrong entry. This will result in
more errors than for regular words in which the phonological code can be used for
retrieving the correct lexical entry.
In the second task, also involving card-sorting lexical decision, non-words were
used that sounded like real words (e.g. werd ). If readers in this homophonic nonword task made more errors in classifying these compared with non-homophonic
non-words, this would be evidence that phonological coding had occurred while
reading. Hearing readers of 8 years of age normally show the effect of homophony,
whether they are good or poor readers (Johnston, Rugg and Scott, 1988); however,
children who do not learn phonics do not demonstrate the effect as much, despite
reading appropriately for their age (Johnston and Thompson, 1989). On both these
tasks it was hypothesized that the hearing reader would be much more affected by
these manipulations than the deaf reader because of the employment of phonological
coding while reading, which is not available for the deaf reader, or only available in a
much impoverished form.
METHOD
Subjects
There were 36 deaf children and 35 hearing children participating in the study. They
were all selected on the grounds that their reading age was within the range of 7 years
to 7 years and 11 months and their nonverbal IQ was above 85. The selection of the
hearing children was further constrained so that the disparity between reading and
chronological age was no more than 7 months. No other basis was used to match the
two groups or exclude subjects. The numbers of males and females were 20 and 16,
respectively, for the deaf children, and 17 and 18, respectively, for the hearing
children. The mean age of the deaf children was 9 years 9 months (SD=1:6; range 6:7
to 12:2) and for the hearing children, 7 years 3 months (SD=0:3; range 6:11 to 8:2).
The deaf children were chosen from 9 different schools and units for the deaf in
London and the home counties, and the matched sample of hearing children were
selected from 4 schools in the home counties. The deaf children were prelingually
deaf and had either severe (70±90 dB) or profound (90 dB or above) hearing loss in
their better ear. Their preferred method of communication was either by signing, in
which case they used Signed English at school (12 males, 8 females), or exclusively
oral (8 males, 8 females).
All the children were given three non-verbal IQ sub-tests from the British Ability
Scales (BAS; Elliot, Murray and Pearson, 1983): block design, speed of reasoning
and recall of designs. There was a significant difference between the two groups in
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overall non-verbal IQ (t(69)=5.84, p50.001). Means (and standard deviations) were
103.2 (13.4) for the deaf and 122.2 (14.0) for the hearing, respectively.
The reading test used was also from the BAS and it involved the child reading
single words aloud from a test card. The deaf children were allowed to sign the words
or articulate them. Where children relied solely on speech there was little difficulty in
deciding whether or not they knew the word because the researchers were familiar
with the spoken language of the individual children. Obvious errors in articulation
were not taken as errors to read a word correctly provided it was clear which word
the child was trying to say.
The reading ages derived from this test were used for matching, so there was no
significant difference between the groups using a t test. The mean reading ages (and
standard deviations) were 7 years and 5 months (0:6) for the deaf and 7 years
4 months (0:6) for the hearing, respectively.
Design and procedure
Each child was tested over four short sessions. At the first session reading age was
assessed using the BAS single word reading test. Children whose reading age fell into
the selected range (7:0±7:11) were given the IQ sub-tests at the second session. Those
with a non-verbal IQ greater than 85 then took part in the final two sessions during
which they carried out the lexical decision card sorting tasks. Each of the two sorting
tasks was divided into two (see below) and one half given in each of the two sessions.
The two sessions were separated by one week and the order in which the sorting
tasks were presented at each session was held constant ± regularity followed by
homophony.
For each sorting task the children were presented with two boxes, one with a cross
and the other with a tick. They were presented with a pile of cards placed in random
order and instructed to put all the cards showing real words into the box with a tick
and all cards with non-words into the box with a cross. Once a box was chosen the
children could not change their minds and at the end of each session the boxes were
emptied and correct and incorrect choices for each sort were noted.
Presentation of the first sorting task was preceded by a single training session using
six pairs of high frequency words and corresponding non-words that were highly
discriminable. It did not prove necessary to use any further training sessions as, at the
final testing session, all the children remembered what was required.
Testing of the hearing children was carried out by a hearing researcher. Testing of
the deaf children was done by a hearing researcher and a deaf researcher who was
fluent in both British Sign Language (BSL) and Signed English. The deaf children
were tested using their preferred form of communication, that is, spoken or Signed
English.
Word reading tasks
The two sorting tasks were designed to assess the involvement of aspects of sublexical
processing. The regularity task consisted of 68 words that were either regular or
irregular in spelling, but matched on word frequency (Kucera and Francis, 1967) and
letter length. There were also 68 non-words, which were matched to each word by
changing one letter (e.g. this to thid ). (See Appendix A for a complete list of stimuli.)
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As mentioned above, each task was presented over two testing sessions. Only one
member of each word and non-word pair was presented in one session, and the other
member was given in the second session. If a sublexical process were employed, the
expectation would be that greater difficulty would be experienced with the irregular
words than with the regular words, as on the irregular words, sublexical processes
would generate a phonological code at variance with the correct pronunciation.
It should be noted that the determination of spelling regularity is problematic as
opinions vary on regularity (e.g. Henderson, 1982). As Brown (1987) notes, there are
many words that are `regular' at one level of analysis, but irregular at another level.
The notion of spelling regularity used here was that there was at least one grapheme
in the irregular word representing a phoneme that is less commonly associated with it
than at least one other phoneme. If any of these irregular words could be considered
to be regular at another level, these particular words would militate against the
hypothesis and so produce a null outcome.
The second task was the homophone task. All the real words were irregular in
spelling and half the non-words were homophonic to their corresponding real word
(e.g. word vs werd ) while the rest of the non-words were non-homophonic (e.g. some
vs somo). The homophonic and non-homophonic words were matched in word
frequency and letter length. A further aspect of the task was that the non-word was
designed to be as visually similar to the real word as possible, so that the use of the
lexical route to make the discrimination between word and non-word was made as
difficult as possible. There were 66 real words and 66 non-words altogether (see
Appendix B for a complete list of stimuli; this set of stimuli was similar to one used
by Beech and Awaida, 1992). The matched words and non-words were presented so
that one occurred in one testing session and the other in the second session. If a
sublexical route were used, processing homophonic non-words should produce
difficulties in the sorting task as the generated phonological code would correspond
to a real word.
RESULTS
The main analysis of the sorting tasks was preceded by calculating split-half
reliabilities on all the individual conditions, pairing performance with first and
second sessions across all 71 subjects. All twelve correlations were significant at the
p50.001 level indicating good reliabilities on all the sorting tasks.
The error scores on each of the lexical decision sorting tasks were analysed using
a mixed design analysis of variance, with deaf vs hearing subjects (referred to
subsequently as the subjects factor) as a between subjects factor and the other
conditions as within subjects.
In the analysis of the regularity task, using a 26262 analysis of variance, with
the conditions and cell means shown in Table 1, there were two significant main
effects and two interactions. The main effects were in subjects (F (1, 69)=9.12;
p50.01), and regularity (F (1, 69)=9.19; p50.01). The two interactions were both
two-way and both involved the regularity dimension. An interaction between
subjects and regularity (F (1, 69)=13.79; p50.001) showed that the hearing readers
were affected by regularity, but the deaf were not, suggesting that GPC coding was
not playing a role in the sorting task for the deaf subjects.
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BEECH AND HARRIS
The second interaction was between the words dimension (i.e. words v. non-words)
and regularity (F (1, 69)=17.43; p50.001). This was an expected interaction: the
irregular real words produced more errors than regular real words, but the effect
disappeared for the non-words. This was because most of the non-words, which were
all created by changing a letter of a real word, did not have a difficult spelling
structure in their new form (e.g. from love to the non-word bove). In other words, the
regularity dimension only existed for the real words because the irregular word
would generate a phonological code at variance with the correct code; for the
so-called `irregular' non-word the generated phonological code, using graphemephoneme conversion rules, would be as much `correct' (even though the output
was not a real word) as a `regular' non-word. A further two-way analysis of variance was computed, therefore, excluding responses to non-words. This analysis
was between regular versus irregular real words, within subjects, and type of subject. This time there was no subject main effect, but the regularity effect persisted
(F (1, 69)=150.6, p50.001) and so did the interaction between regularity and type of
subject (F (1, 69)=9.36, p50.01).
A 26262 analysis of variance on the homophone task had the conditions
and means illustrated in Figure 1. This analysis produced main effects for subjects
(F (1, 69)=19.40; p50.001) and homophony (F (1, 69)=6.75; p50.05). There was a
two-way interaction between homophony and word v non-words (F (1, 69)=103.28,
p50.001) because the homophony effect only occurred for non-words, as expected.
There was also a three-way interaction on all three factors (F (1, 69)=13.87,
p50.001). The figure shows that the hearing children were adversely affected by the
homophonic non-words, whereas the deaf children were not affected to the same
extent. This was confirmed by t tests in which there was a significant difference
between the deaf and hearing in errors on homophonic non-words (t (69)=3.15;
p=.002) but not for the non-homophonic non-words (t=1.10). In contrast to
the regularity effect, homophony is an effect that is hypothesized to occur in the
non-word conditions. Therefore, a 262 analysis of variance was computed on the
non-words only with homophony as the within subjects factor. This produced
significant main effects for homophony and subjects (F (1, 69)=4.6, p50.05) and
(F (1, 69)=72.4, p50.001), respectively. The two-way interaction was significant
(F (1, 69)=18.5, p50.001). This is a similar interaction to that of the regularity
sorting task and can be viewed as confirmation that the hearing children were using
phonological coding to a much greater extent than the deaf children while reading
Table 1. Error means and standard deviations for regular and irregular words
Words
Non-words
Regular
Irregular
Regular
Irregular
Deaf children (n=36)
Mean
SD
8.92
4.47
9.72
5.84
11.11
7.19
9.94
6.51
Hearing children (n=35)
Mean
SD
8.87
4.31
12.20
5.28
13.11
7.49
13.37
7.02
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Figure 1. Reading errors in categorizing words versus homophonic non-words and words versus nonhomophonic non-words for children who can hear (solid line) compared to those who are prelingually deaf
(hatched line).
isolated words. This time, however, there appeared to be a slight increase in errors
for homophonous compared to non-homophonous non-words for the hearingimpaired subjects. This difference was found to be a significant one by t-test
(t (35)=3.7, p50.01). Individual differences were further explored within the deaf
subjects by computing the extent to which they were affected by homophony.
Homophony, measured by the difference in score between homophonous and nonhomophonous non-words, was the basis for comparing those with a score difference
above 3 (n=9) and those with a score difference at or below zero (n=13). There were
no significant differences in non-verbal intelligence, regularity, reading quotient
(calculated by dividing reading age by chronological age and then multiplying by
100) or hearing loss (measured in dB) between these two sub-groups.
The relationships between the variables were explored further by computing
correlations within each group. Five measures were taken for each subject: reading
quotient, non-verbal IQ, regularity and homophony and hearing level; for the
hearing subjects all of these except hearing level were included in the correlation
matrix. Regularity was based on the difference in reading errors between reading
regular (R) and irregular (I) words: (I7R)/(I+R). In the same manner, homophony
was the difference in errors when reading homophonous non-words compared with
non-homophonous non-words. Thus these last two measures were examining the
crucial parts of the data that differentiated the deaf and hearing readers.
There was an unexpected low correlation between homophony and regularity for
the hearing readers (r=0.07). Both measures were reflecting the extent of sublexical
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processing in reading so one might have expected the performance of individuals to
show similar magnitudes on each measure. This expectation would apply only to the
hearing readers who had demonstrated significant effects of regularity and
homophony. There was one significant correlation for the deaf (r=0.61, p50.01),
between non-verbal intelligence and reading quotient, and for the hearing there was a
significant correlation between homophony and reading quotient. Those who were
more advanced in reading demonstrated a stronger homophony effect.
In the light of comparative lack of effects shown by the deaf children, two further
analyses were performed. The first compared the best deaf readers in the sample with
the poorest since, although all the deaf children had reading ages within the same
range (7:0±7:11), there was considerable variation in their chronological age (6:11±
8:2). Therefore reading quotient was used in order to take this into account. The top
and bottom thirds of the deaf sample on reading quotient were compared on nonverbal IQ and sensitivity to regularity and homophony, and hearing level. The best
deaf readers differed from the poorest in having a higher non-verbal IQ (t (22)=2.55,
p50.05) but did not differ on the other measures.
A second set of analyses compared the oral deaf children with those who had
proficient signing. For the purposes of this comparison only children with either
good oral language (i.e. no use of signing) or good Signed English were selected.
Children who were proficient in both modalities or in neither were excluded. The oral
deaf children used some signing, but had a major reliance on oral communication.
This assessment was based on classroom observation as well as interaction with
researchers (one of whom was a fluent deaf signer).
There were 12 fluent oral-only children and 16 who were fluent users of Signed
English only. The performance of the two sub-groups was compared on each of the
lexical decision tests using the same analysis of variance designs as in the comparison
between deaf and hearing subjects. The results were highly consistent. In all three
tasks, there was no main effect of sub-group and there were no significant interactions involving sub-groups. This shows that, in each word reading task, the two
sub-groups of deaf children behaved in an identical fashion with neither being
significantly affected by the experimental manipulation. The means of the various
conditions are shown in Table 2.
DISCUSSION
These results strongly suggest that hearing children, when reading single words, use
phonological coding to a considerably greater extent than prelingually deaf children
of the same reading age. Deaf children were not affected by manipulating spelling
regularity. Furthermore, there was no association between regularity and reading
score, discounting the possibility that the more able deaf readers were affected by
regularity while the less able were not. This supports the hypothesis that the young
deaf readers, unlike their hearing counterparts, have developed sight vocabulary up
to the level examined in the present study (reading age of 7 years) predominantly on
the basis of lexical processing. By this we mean that there is probably a direct
activation of the meaning of words based on the processing of the letters. This does
not preclude the parallel activation of representational processes connected with
sign. The involvement of sign was not tested in this study, but has been studied
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Table 2. Means and standard deviations of error scores of oral (n=12) and signing (n=16) deaf children
REGULARITY TASK
Words
Non-words
Regular
Irregular
Regular
Irregular
Oral
Mean
SD
9.17
5.72
8.50
7.31
10.25
7.56
9.75
7.21
Signing
Mean
SD
9.38
3.40
10.19
5.01
11.00
7.62
9.25
6.38
Homophones
Non-homophones
Homophones
Non-homophones
Oral
Mean
SD
9.92
5.90
10.33
7.48
13.33
7.72
11.17
7.36
Signing
Mean
SD
10.06
4.99
11.06
4.61
11.44
6.91
10.25
7.48
HOMOPHONES TASK
Words
Non-words
by others (e.g. Andrews and Mason, 1986; Hirsh-Pasek, 1987; Treiman and HirshPasek, 1983).
Our main measure for examining the use of sublexical processes was spelling
regularity. Although the homophonic task was also successful at differentiating the
two groups, it is open to question whether the latter task actually was tapping
precisely the same kind of difference in the use of the sublexical route. This is because
of its lack of significant association with performance in the regularity task for the
hearing subjects. Both tasks were affected by the extent of letter-to-sound coding, but
there are some differences between them. One difference was that in the regularity
task the measure was based on comparing conditions in which positive responses
were made. This was because, as explained before, there were no differences in
regularity in the non-words. By contrast, in homophony the critical comparisons
were between the non-homophonic and homophonic conditions relying on negative
responses. While both tasks indicated susceptibility to letter-sound coding for the
hearing, but not the deaf readers, other strategic differences in the tasks could have
been masking this commonality within the hearing readers. For example, some
hearing readers might employ letter-to-sound coding only as a post-lexical check for
real words and thus demonstrate a regularity effect but not a homophony effect.
Although we assume that phonological information has been activated, it is difficult
to distinguish this phonological activation from phonologically mediated access of
meaning. But we can at least be clear that there is a virtual absence of either type of
phonology for the deaf readers.
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BEECH AND HARRIS
At first sight it may appear surprising that there were no significant differences
between orally educated deaf children and those who sign. An orally educated deaf
child might be expected to read more like a hearing child and thus to be susceptible to
the effects of regularity and homophony. However, these results strongly suggest that
the child's educational environment has little influence upon the way that reading
proceeds. In particular, orally educated children do not appear to make more use of
phonological coding than do children who are taught to sign.
This conclusion is supported by the results of a study by Waters and Doehring
(1990) in which only orally educated deaf children were tested. These authors used
prelingually deaf children of about the same age as those in the present study and
they presented their subjects with two lexical decision tasks that assessed the use
of phonological coding in reading. Neither of the tasks produced any evidence of
phonological coding by the deaf children and, when the same tasks were
administered to older readers, a similar finding emerged.
If the results of this experiment are correct in suggesting that the deaf children ±
even those who are orally educated ± make little use of phonological coding in
learning to read, the question arises as to what strategies they do employ. Most
theories of learning to read propose that, having initially relied on the use of phonological mediation, children eventually develop direct associations between orthographic and lexical codes. It was traditionally assumed that the development of
orthographic knowledge was distinct from the development of reading strategies that
involved phonological encoding, and that in a skilled reader phonological mediation
was no longer normally used (Doctor and M. Coltheart, 1980). It is tempting to
suggest that deaf children use direct orthographic-lexical routes and bypass use of
phonological ones. However, there is some recent evidence that the distinction between orthographic and phonemic codes is not as clear cut as once had been thought.
Goswami (1991) has argued that the development of orthographic knowledge is
influenced by what children already know about the intra-syllabic structure of words.
Using a task that involved reading new words by analogy, she found that children
learned more about shared consonant blends, both at the beginning and end of
words, when these coincided with the onset-rime boundary. Thus children learned
more about tr in trim and trap than about tri in trim and trip; and more about ink in
wink and pink than about nk in wink and tank.
Van Orden, Pennington and Stone (1990) have argued that phonological coding
continues to be used in word identification. They report data from Condry,
McMahon-Rideout and Levy (1979) that involved synonym judgment (glad-happy).
Distractor items included word pairs with a high degree of phonological similarity
( plate-wait ). Condry et al. found that there was a developmental increase in
susceptibility to phonological interference.
These two studies suggest that difficulties in the development of phonemic
encoding may have long term consequences and, thus, that the deaf child will
experience great difficulty in developing alternative codes for reading that rely on
orthographic knowledge.
Although orally educated deaf children do not appear to make use of phonological
coding in reading, another possibility is that children who learn to sign are able to use
their knowledge of signing when they learn to read. Two American studies suggest
that this is so. Andrews and Mason (1986) tested deaf children aged between five
and eight years and found that their reading progress was facilitated by training them
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to match signs to print. Hirsh-Pasek (1987) found that reading success among
profoundly deaf children, whose parents were native signers, was highly correlated
with the ability to segment and manipulate a finger-spelled lexicon.
The present study did not examine this possibility directly but it is relevant to note
that those children in our study who were native signers (who were brought up as
signers by their deaf signing parents) made very good progress in reading. Three out
of our four native signers were in the top seven of our 36 deaf children in terms of
their reading quotient. The best reader in the entire sample of deaf readers was one of
our native signers with a reading quotient of 114. The fourth native signer had had a
disrupted educational background, but even he had a middle ranking in the sample.
Interpreting the relationship between signing ability and reading success is a
complex matter. Deaf children of deaf parents generally out-perform those born to
hearing parents on a variety of developmental measures including language
development (Kampfe and Turecheck, 1987) and the linguistic competence of the
native signers in this study undoubtedly contributed to their success in learning to
read. However, it is relevant to note that some of the schools for the deaf that used
signing made explicit use of both signing and finger-spelling in the teaching of
reading, and it was notable that children often produced the appropriate sign when
reading a word in the initial reading assessment.
Presumably native signers develop a richer language network than other deaf
children as a result of their early signing experience. Learning to read involves
connecting representations of words to their printed forms. Perhaps these native
signers have a more developed representational system on which to develop
connections with print. As mentioned before, Johnston and Thompson (1989) have
studied hearing children, reading normally, who have not been taught phonics (and
who display similar characteristics to our deaf sample on homophony). These
children have learned to read by the `book experience' approach (Clay, 1979). If the
native signer has a richly developed representational system, the `book experience'
approach is probably the more effective way to learn to read given their difficulties in
phonics. It might follow that other deaf children could benefit from the same kind of
background as the native signers.
Clearly our dependent measure utilizing error scores has succeeded in differentiating deaf and hearing subjects, supporting the efficacy of using error scores. Also, the
range of error performance was reasonable in scaling terms as there was a lack of
ceiling or floor effects in all conditions. Latency measures were not taken in the
experiment. Latency data are by no means as easy to interpret in children compared
to adults, especially when comparing two groups of different chronological ages.
Furthermore, in designing the experiment we saw a virtue in having a card sorting
task that was easier to demonstrate physically for both deaf and hearing children and
where the stimuli are clear and easy to inspect, compared with a latency experiment
involving other modes of presentation (e.g. by computer) ± even though the sorting
task precluded the monitoring of latencies for each stimulus presentation.
In conclusion, it is highly unlikely that most of the deaf participants in this study
will progress in reading at the same rate as the younger hearing children. The deaf
sample were, on average, over 2 years behind in reading age. In fact, deaf children
generally make poor progress. For instance, only about 1% of deaf 16-year-olds read
at their age level (Gaines, Mandler and Bryant, 1981). The present findings suggest
that our deaf readers are not using a sublexical route to help the decoding of low
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BEECH AND HARRIS
frequency unfamiliar words and to confirm the meaning of familiar ones that would
be available to the hearing reader. If the deaf children in this study had the facility to
use a sublexical route when they had a reading age of 7 years, they were displaying
little evidence of this in the reading experiments, whereas the hearing children
appeared to have used such a route while processing the experimental stimuli.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research was supported by grant number R00 23 1349 from the Economic and
Social Research Council, UK, to Margaret Harris and John Beech. The authors are
grateful to the participating schools for their cooperation during the study and to
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Rhona Johnston and Marc Marschark for comments on a
previous draft of this paper.
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Appendix A. List of matched stimuli for the Regularity Test
Regular words
Matched non-words
Irregular words
Matched non-words
this
not
each
came
still
without
thing
true
pattern
foot
correct
horses
plane
milk
radio
bank
spend
verb
pencil
roof
holes
enter
causes
occur
perform
tribe
rang
worms
trust
armed
seated
spends
pines
weep
thid
fot
eash
cime
stull
withoud
thung
krue
pattorn
fout
correst
hirses
plone
molk
rakio
bink
spund
verg
tencil
roaf
hotes
unter
couses
octur
perfurm
trime
reng
borms
truse
armet
seaked
sponds
punes
werp
when
which
would
also
might
once
knew
half
weather
hour
caught
measure
ocean
weight
love
knife
taught
rough
lose
whale
thread
tough
ghost
whip
guest
wrap
wrist
chalk
wharf
dumb
cough
tighter
nigh
resign
shen
ghich
woulk
alsa
mighs
omce
knep
halb
weasher
houl
cought
mersure
oceen
werght
bove
knofe
targht
hough
lote
whule
chread
taugh
ghist
whep
guast
wrop
wrost
shalk
whark
dimb
sough
toghter
negh
resogn
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Appendix B. List of matched stimuli for the Homophony Test
Non-homophonic Pairs
Homophonic Pairs
Word
Non-word
Word
Non-word
some
does
great
own
answer
piece
heavy
listen
ideas
straight
minute
ahead
sign
fight
wheel
knowledge
pressure
strength
wheat
laugh
search
daughter
foreign
surely
bears
weigh
whales
muscle
anxious
whisper
financial
juicy
cereal
somo
coes
areat
owm
ansver
plece
heovy
liston
ideos
atraight
minate
aheod
sigm
jight
whed
knouledge
prensure
strangth
whenb
taugh
seorch
doughter
foraign
sutely
kears
welgh
whapes
moscle
anxlous
whisger
financlal
julcy
cereaf
your
word
should
any
often
instead
heart
friend
whose
measure
woman
eight
guess
dead
bread
Christmas
column
shoulder
beauty
scene
police
neighbours
thread
doubt
knees
castle
whistle
damage
campaign
assured
schedule
pearl
exhaust
yor
werd
shuld
eny
offen
insted
haart
frend
whoze
messure
wuman
aight
gess
ded
bredd
Cristmas
columm
sholder
beeuty
seene
pulice
naighbours
thred
dowbt
kneas
casle
wistle
damige
campain
asured
shedule
perl
exaust
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