Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education Advance Access originally published online on September 21, 2005
The Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 2006 11(1):21-38; doi:10.1093/deafed/enj001
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Empirical Articles |
What the Processing of Real Words and Pseudohomophones Can Tell Us about the Development of Orthographic Knowledge in Prelingually Deafened Individuals
University of Haifa
This study represents an attempt to determine the nature and efficiency of the strategies used by prelingually deafened individuals for the recognition of written words with reference to an orthographic self-teaching concept (D. L. Share, 1995). A research paradigm asking the participants to make categorical judgments for real words and pseudohomophones of the real words was used for gathering the data. Participants were prelingually deafened, native signers (n = 11, age = 14.18) and a hearing control group (n = 25, age = 15.00). In general, findings suggest that, although the participants with deafness were very impaired in their phonological decoding abilities, their efficiency in recognizing and categorizing written words was similar to that of their hearing counterparts. This suggests that they must have developed strategies for the acquisition of orthographic knowledge that do not rely on phonology.
1 ISL is the signed language used by the deaf community in Israel. As in American Sign Language, its vocabulary is built systematically according to limited sets of formational parameters such as hand shape, hand movement, and place of articulation.
2 In Israel, children start primary school at about age six.
3 Signed Hebrew and spoken Hebrew are similar in a limited sense, reflected in a rough matching of the sign order to the word order in Hebrew. In most other linguistic aspects, there are essential incompatibilities between the two systems, such as an almost complete lack of devices in Signed Hebrew to represent the rich morphological structure of spoken Hebrew.
4 Because in Israel there are no standardized reading comprehension tests available, the actual reading level of the participants with deafness could not be determined. Estimations in this regard are based on teacher ratings that, although subjective, show broad interteacher agreement.
.05.
7 A full report of findings from this experiment and their implication in relation to the phonological and orthographic abilities of prelingually deafened and hearing individuals is in preparation.
8 It should be emphasized that the causal relationship drawn based on such findings was usually interpreted to be in the opposite direction, with phonological coding leading to more effective reading skills.
Correspondence should be sent to Paul Miller, Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Haifa 31905, Israel (e-mail: mpaul{at}construct.haifa.ac.il).
Received November 5, 2004; revised April 11, 2005; accepted April 13, 2005
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