Phonological awareness and decoding skills in deaf adolescents

Abstract

Abstract This study investigated the phonological awareness skills of a group of deaf adolescents and how these skills correlated with decoding skills (single word and non-word reading) and receptive vocabulary.Twenty, congenitally profoundly deaf adolescents with at least average nonverbal cognitive skills were tested on a range of phonological awareness tasks, and a non-word and real-word reading task, and their speech intelligibility was rated. Scores on a receptive vocabulary measure were gathered from existing records. All participants met an inclusion criterion of scoring within one standard deviation of the mean on a non-verbal reasoning task.As a group, compared to the hearing standardisation samples, the participants' single-word reading fell within the normal range; their non-word reading skills were significantly stronger and their phonological awareness skills and receptive vocabulary were significantly weaker. The participants' phonological awareness skills were relatively stronger at the lev...