Reading Difficulties in Adult Deaf Readers of French: Phonological Codes, Not Guilty!

Abstract

Deaf people often achieve low levels of reading skills. The hypothesis that the use of phonological codes is associated with good reading skills in deaf readers is not yet fully supported in the literature. We investigated skilled and less skilled adult deaf readers' use of orthographic and phonological codes in reading. Experiment 1 used a masked priming paradigm to investigate automatic use of these codes during visual word processing. Experiment 2 used a serial recall task to determine whether orthographic and phonological codes are used to maintain words in memory. Skilled hearing, skilled deaf, and less skilled deaf readers used orthographic codes during word recognition and recall, but only skilled hearing readers relied on phonological codes during these tasks. It is important to note that skilled and less skilled deaf readers performed similarly in both tasks, indicating that reading difficulties in deaf adults may not be linked to the activation of phonological codes during reading.