Abstract
Reading continues to be a challenging task for most deaf children. Bimodal bilingual education creates a supportive environment that stimulates deaf children’s learning through the use of sign language. However, it is still unclear how exposure to sign language might contribute to improving reading ability. Here, we investigate the relative contribution of several cognitive and linguistic variables to the development of word and text reading fluency in deaf children in bimodal bilingual education programmes. The participants of this study were 62 school-aged (8 to 10 years old at the start of the 3-year study) deaf children who took part in bilingual education (using Dutch and Sign Language of The Netherlands) and 40 age-matched hearing children. We assessed vocabulary knowledge in speech and sign, phonological awareness in speech and sign, receptive fingerspelling ability, and short-term memory at time 1 (T1). At times 2 (T2) and 3 (T3), we assessed word and text reading fluency. We found that (1) speech-based vocabulary strongly predicted word and text reading at T2 and T3, (2) fingerspelling ability was a strong predictor of word and text reading fluency at T2 and T3, (3) speech-based phonological awareness predicted word reading accuracy at T2 and T3 but did not predict text reading fluency, and (4) fingerspelling and STM predicted word reading latency at T2 while sign-based phonological awareness predicted this outcome measure at T3. These results suggest that fingerspelling may have an important function in facilitating the construction of orthographical/phonological representations of printed words for deaf children and strengthening word decoding and recognition abilities.
Highlights
Reading is a challenging task for most deaf children
In addition to speech-based vocabulary and phonological awareness, and short-term memory, we investigated whether sign-based vocabulary and phonological awareness, and fingerspelling ability, predict word and text reading fluency
Influence of cochlear implants (CIs) Independent samples t-tests showed that the deaf children with and without a CI did not perform significantly differently in word or text reading fluency assessment at time 2 (T2) and Languages 2022, 7, x FOR PEER REVIETW3 and were treated as a single group in all10thofe30analyses
Summary
Reading is a challenging task for most deaf children. It has been consistently observed that, at the group level, deaf children show lower reading levels than hearing children of the same age (e.g., Karchmer and Mitchell 2003; Marschark et al 2007; Musselman 2000; Qi and Mitchell 2012; Wauters et al 2006; Moreno-Pérez et al 2015). Research with hearing children has established that vocabulary knowledge, phonological awareness (i.e., ability to recognize and manipulate the sub-lexical structure of words), fluent word recognition, and phonological short-term memory are strong predictors of reading skills in hearing children (e.g., Castles and Coltheart 2004; Dickinson et al 2003; Verhoeven et al 2011). Bilingual education has the potential to provide students, those with little access to speech, with alternative routes to increase their reading skills. It is still unclear whether—and how—SL instruction effectively supports reading development. In addition to speech-based vocabulary and phonological awareness, and short-term memory, we investigated whether sign-based vocabulary and phonological awareness, and fingerspelling ability, predict word and text reading fluency. In the rest of the introduction, we discuss relevant previous literature on each of these predictors
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