The word recognition skills of profoundly, prelingually deaf children

How do the word recognition skills of deaf children compare with those of their hearing counterparts? Four groups of 20 subjects (deaf readers, hearing good readers, poor readers and young readers) matched on sex, intelligence and chronological or reading age participated in two experiments. Experiment 1 examined orthographic regularity effects and non-word pronounceability effects and revealed that deaf readers, like good hearing readers, access the meanings of words through visual mechanisms but that those mechanisms are slower and less accurate than those of their hearing counterparts. Further, the results suggested that, unlike young readers, deaf readers do not appear to use the facility of the phonological route to the lexicon for reading low frequency exception words. Nevertheless, the deaf were observed to activate phonological information for decoding pronounceable non-words, but more slowly than their matched good readers. Experiment 2 varied the reliance upon visual features of words by examining regularity effects for words presented in upper-case and lower-case letters. Results indicated that deaf readers spontaneously used visual mechanisms for the recognition of low frequency exception words to provide fast but inaccurate responses. In contrast the good readers, poor readers and young readers accessed the meanings of those words through phonological processes.