Visual Word Recognition in Deaf Readers: The interplay between orthographic, semantic and phonological information

Rowley, K.

Poor literacy is prevalent in the deaf population. For hearing readers, several studies have demonstrated that good visual word recognition skills are crucial for successful literacy attainment and poor readers are likely to have poor word recognition skills. In particular, phonology is known to play an important role in visual word recognition in hearing individuals. The role of phonology in deaf readers has also been addressed extensively. However, these have generated mixed results, which may be partly due to different methodological approaches and lack of control for reading level of participants.

The interplay between orthographic, semantic and phonological information for deaf, adult readers will be discussed by drawing results from several different experiments that explore these elements during visual word recognition and sentence reading. Various methodologies were used for investigation and include: lexical decision, masked priming, the visual world and the invisible boundary paradigm.

Results from the various tasks show that there are similarities in the way deaf skilled and hearing readers process semantic and orthographic information. However, there were differences in how they process phonological information: deaf and hearing readers show similar effects of phonology in tasks that do not require semantic activation, however, deaf readers do not show phonological activation in tasks that require semantics while hearing readers do. This suggests qualitative differences in reading strategies for the two populations. These differences do not account for differences in literacy attainment across deaf and hearing groups (as our participants where matched for reading levels). Implications for theories of visual word recognition will be discussed and a proposed model of visual word recognition for deaf readers based on these findings will be introduced.