Structural vs. Semantic Coding in Reading of Isolated Works by Deaf Children

Abstract

It is well known that deaf children experience great problems in reading. The paper explores the deaf problems in reading isolated words with a continuous recognition task, including 20 "basic" words and four distracters selected for the basic words on the basis either of structural similarities (visual and phonetic) or semantic connection (a synonym or a strongly associated word). Deaf children, 11-15 years old, were compared with hearing children matched for grade (experiment one) and for age or school achievement (experiment two). Patterns of confusion, inferred by false positives, indicated that hearing children relied more on semantic properties of items and deaf children more on structural properties. This result contrasts with the idea that deaf reading difficulties are mainly related to an absence of structural processing of items and suggests that their main problem concerns a less deep coding of items during reading.