Deaf Children's Use of Phonological Coding: Evidence from Reading, Spelling, and Working Memory

0 Oxford University Press 2004 ; all rights reserved 1 This research was supported by a grant from The Nuffield Foundation Harris, Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London , Egham Hill, Surrey TW20 0EX ( - Two groups of deaf children, aged 8 and 14 years, were presented with a number of tasks designed to assess their reliance on phonological coding. Their performance was compared with that of hearing children of the same chronological age (CA) and reading age (RA). Performance on the first task, short-term recall of pictures, showed that the deaf childrens spans were comparable to those of RA controls but lower than CA controls. For the older deaf children, short-term memory span predicted reading ability. There was no clear evidence that the deaf children were using phonological coding in short-term memory when recall of dissimilar items was compared with recall of items with similarly sounding names. In the second task, which assessed orthographic awareness, performance of the deaf children was similar to that of RA controls although scores predicted reading level for the deaf children but not the hearing. The final task was a picture spelling test in which there were marked differences between the deaf and hearing children, most notably in the number of spelling refusals (which was higher for the deaf children in the older group than their RA controls) and the percentage of phonetic errors (which was considerably lower for both groups of deaf children than for any of the hearing controls). Overall these results provide support for the view that deaf children place little reliance on phonological coding. Many previous studies have shown that the great majority of deaf children find reading difficult (see Marschark & Harris, 1996; Musselman, 2000, for reviews). In this context, deaf children are those with a congenital or early-acquired hearing loss of 85dB or greater in the better ear. Reading at an age-appropriate level is an exceptional achievement for such children, and the majority do not attain a level of literacy that enables them to cope with the daily demands of modern society. Although there is widespread agreement about the difficulties that deaf children encounter in learning to read, there remains considerable doubt about why reading is so difficult. There are undoubtedly many different factors, as a number of authors have argued (e.g., Marschark & Harris, 1996; Musselman, 2000), but one key issue concerns the kind of reading strategies that deaf children develop. There is considerably more heterogeneity among the deaf population in this respect than among typically developing hearing children, for whom it is well documented that learning the relationship between letters and sounds is important for both spelling and reading. This is the case even for English, where the letter-sound correspondences are relatively inconsistent compared to those that occur in an orthographically regular script such as Italian (Harris & Hatano, 1999). The importance of establishing early awareness of letter-sound (or graphemephoneme) correspondences has been highlighted in the National Literacy Strategy, where training in phonics forms an important part of the literacy hour in the first years of primary school. Specific phonics training has also been successfully used in a number of recent studies (see, for example, Connelly, Johnston, & What is not yet clear is whether deaf children can also develop a successful phonological strategy for reading and spelling. A number of studies of deaf children in primary school have found little or no evidence for phonological coding in either reading or spelling across a range of tasks (Waters & Doehring, 1990; Merrills, Underwood, & Wood, 1994; Leybaert & Alegria, 1995; Beech & Harris, 1997; Harris & Beech, 1998; Nielsen & Luetke-Stahlman, 2002). For example, Beech and Harris (1997) compared hearing and deaf children (aged between 7;0 and 7;11) on a lexical decision task. Hearing children were more likely than deaf children to mistakenly identify a pseudohomophone (such as werd) as a real word and also to incorrectly reject a real word with an irregular spelling (e.g., once). Both the incorrect acceptance of pseudohomophones and the incorrect rejection of irregular words are hallmarks of the use of a phonological strategy for reading. Leybaert and Alegria (1995) found similar evidence of a lack of phonological coding in spelling in French-speaking 11-year-old deaf children, and Harris and Beech (1998) found that 5-year-old deaf children showed poor performance in a task in which they had to identify pictures with similarly sounding names (such as gun and sun). There is, however, some evidence for phonological awareness in primary-school deaf children. Sterne and Goswami (2000) used a task in which children had to select a homophone to match a picture (e.g., boiz as a match for a picture of two boys). The correct homophone had to be distinguished from three distractor items that differed by one letter (i.e. roiz, beiz, and boin). Although the deaf children were not as accurate as their hearing peers, Sterne and Goswami found that the performance of the deaf children was above chance, suggesting that some phonemic knowledge may be available to deaf children in primary school. The authors also found that the deaf children had syllabic knowledge that was equivalenton both syllable tapping and comparison of the length of picture namesto hearing children of comparable RA, and their ability to make rhyme judgments was above chance even though it was inferior to that of RA controls. Harris and Beech (1998) also found that a small number of deaf children performed well on their sound-similarity task, and in Beech and Harris (1997) there was a small but significant effect of homophony for the deaf children, with homophonic nonwords producing more errors than nonhomophonic nonwords. Studies of older deaf childrenadolescents and college studentshave found much more consistent evidence of phonological coding, although such a code is generally recognized as being different and less accurate than that available to hearing children (Dodd, 1980; Hanson, Shankweiler, & Fischer, 1983; Hanson, 1986; Campbell, 1992; Burden & Campbell, 1994; Leybaert & Alegria, 1995). Again, there are significant individual differences that may arise, in part, from variations in educational practice. For example, in a recent study, LaSasso, Crain, and Leybaert (2003) described the superior rhyming abilities of deaf adults who had been exposed to cued speech since the age of 5 years. There are two notes of caution that must be applied to these studies of older children. First, many of the studies have tested deaf college students, who are unlikely to be representative of the population as a whole since only a small proportion of deaf adolescents receive a college education. Secondly, the availability of phonological information during reading do (...truncated)