The development of word‐coding skills in the born deaf: An experimental study of deaf school‐leavers

Abstract

Single word spelling for picture names and lexical decision were examined systematically in a group of born‐deaf English school‐leavers with a reading age of between 9 and 10 years. The deaf were better at these word‐coding skills than their reading‐age matched peers. Like them they showed systematic effects of word regularity (phonological and orthographic) in their single word spellings. In lexical decision the deaf were as fast and as accurate as chronological controls and showed similar patterns of sensitivity to spelling regularity.While both the younger and older hearing control groups showed a consistent pattern of performance across the spelling and reading tasks, with regularity effects marked in the younger and less marked in the older group, the deaf by comparison showed somewhat disjoint patterns of reading and spelling processes. This is discussed in the context of variable patterns of word reading and spelling development in hearing children.Word reading and writing is better in these deaf students than is predicted by their standardized text comprehension scores. It is suggested that in the born‐deaf, word‐coding skills are isolated with respect to other language skills; they have not become contextualized. Moreover, the pattern of performance on these single word tasks suggests that the development of such lower level literacy skills is still incomplete.