Abstract:

Several theories have been proposed regarding the roots of deaf individuals’ poor reading comprehension (RC). One of them postulates that their poor reading skills reflect a failure at the lexical level. Lately, this position has been challenged by research showing that deaf readers process written words as affectively as hearing counterparts. Moreover, some research suggests that what fails deaf readers to understand what they read is insufficiently internalized syntactical knowledge of the spoken language. The present study aimed to examine whether deaf readers manifest difficulties in the syntactic processing of written text rather than a weakness to recognize the words of which it is composed.

Three prelingually deaf 5th graders served as the test sample. Their initial RC, tested with a set of 30 semantically plausible and semantically implausible sentences, approached chance level performance. Intervention to improve their syntactic awareness was based on a learning environment in which wrong responses to sentences activated an animation that visually delineated the origin of the error with reference to the sentence’s syntactic structure. Intervention improved participants’ understanding of the original set of sentences from close to chance level to almost perfect comprehension. Similar results were found one month later when reassessing their RC with a different set of sentences. Findings support a theory that links RC failure in deaf readers with lack of internalization of the syntactic structure of the spoken code. They further show that a position that assigns this failure to a weakness at the lexical level may not be tenable.

Keywords:

Reading, Syntactic processing, Visualization, Computerized learning environment, Deafness.