The effect of vocalizing on comprehension in the profoundly deaf.

Abstract

A group of hearing and a group of profoundly deaf school children were tested for comprehension after reading prose passages either silently or aloud. The deaf subjects were known, from previously published studies, to comprise a subgroup who primarily relied on articulatory coding to memorize verbal material, and another subgroup who seemed more to rely on a visual code. Neither the hearing controls nor the deaf articulators showed a significant effect of reading mode. The ‘visualizers’ comprehended significantly less when they read aloud than when they read silently. Though the two deaf groups performed equally well after silent reading, after reading aloud the comprehension difference was significant at better than the 0·001 level.