Visual Word Recognition in Deaf Readers

Poor literacy is prevalent in the deaf population. This thesis assesses levels of literacy in the
deaf population by investigating visual word recognition in deaf readers. 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.

Studies reported in this thesis explore the role of orthography, semantics and phonology in
deaf skilled readers during visual word recognition and also sentence reading using various
methodologies and controlling carefully for reading level. The methodologies used include:
lexical decision, masked priming, the visual world and the invisible boundary paradigm.

The results from the various tasks described in this thesis show that there are similarities in
the way deaf skilled and hearing readers process semantic and orthographic information.
However, I found 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 are discussed and in the final
chapter, I introduce a proposed model of visual word recognition for deaf readers based on
findings reported in this thesis.