Speech Reading and Learning to Read: A Comparison of 8-Year-Old Profoundly Deaf Children With Good and Poor Reading Ability
Margaret Harris and Constanza Moreno
University of London
Nine children with severe-profound prelingual hearing loss and single-word reading scores not more than 10 months behind chronological age (Good Readers) were matched with 9 children whose reading lag was at least 15 months (Poor Readers). Good Readers had significantly higher spelling and reading comprehension scores. They produced significantly more phonetic errors (indicating the use of phonological coding) and more often correctly represented the number of syllables in spelling than Poor Readers. They also scored more highly on orthographic awareness and were better at speech reading. Speech intelligibility was the same in the two groups. Cluster analysis revealed that only three Good Readers showed strong evidence of phonetic coding in spelling although seven had good representation of syllables; only four had high orthographic awareness scores. However, all 9 children were good speech readers, suggesting that a phonological code derived through speech reading may underpin reading success for deaf children.
This research was supported by a grant from The Nuffield Foundation to the first author.
1 In spite of evidence for the utility of CS for deaf children learning French, the evidence for children learning English is less convincing. Alegria and Lechat (2005) note some differences between French and English, especially in the higher incidence of diphthongs in English, that may make CS less useful for English.
2 Unequal variances were assumed for this comparison.
3 In view of the number of comparisons that were made, it was decided to set p = <.01 as the criterion for significance, using a one-tailed test.
Correspondence should be sent to Margaret Harris, Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham Hill, Surrey TW20 0EX, United Kingdom (e-mail:
m.harris@rhul.ac.uk).
Received October 6, 2005; revised December 1, 2005; accepted December 11, 2005
