Deaf readers' comprehension of relative clause structures

Abstract

ABSTRACTIt is commonly found that most deaf readers display an overall depressed level of reading performance in conjunction with specific difficulties in complex syntax. In this study, deaf good and poor readers' comprehension of relative clause structures was tested in written English, signed English, and American Sign Language. It was found that the behavior of deaf good and poor readers was parallel across relative clause sentence types, and that the deaf readers generally performed similarly to hearing readers tested in a different study. These results support the hypothesis that a specific syntactic disability does not differentiate deaf good and poor readers. Instead, it is suggested that a processing deficit may underlie the poor readers' comprehension difficulties.