Phonology and Deaf Readers: New Insights On An Old Debate

An implicit assumption guiding mainstream educational methods in deaf education is that deaf children have awareness of the phonological structure of spoken language (have phonological representations). Surprisingly however, there is very little empirical research testing this assumption in terms of both the construction and the specification of deaf children’s underlying representations of speech. Thus an understanding of the extent to which speech perception in the absence of audition result in similarities or differences in the way that speech patterns are represented or processed between deaf and hearing individuals is limited. To fill this void, this study investigated whether prelingual, profoundly deaf children have awareness of phonological structure at three levels of linguistic complexity. A clear understanding of phonological development in deaf learners has particular relevance given the significance of spoken language phonological processes in cognitive accounts of reading disability in the hearing population and the assumption that these accounts fully explain deaf children’s reading difficulties and abilities.