Syntactic and semantic processing in Hebrew readers with prelingual deafness

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Deaf Education

Background:

• Reading comprehension is crucial for academic success.
• Deaf individuals often face challenges in reading comprehension compared to hearing peers.
• Understanding the role of semantic and syntactic processing is key to addressing these challenges.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the impact of semantic clues on reading comprehension in deaf and hearing children.
• To compare the processing of syntactically simple versus complex sentences with varying semantic plausibility.
• To examine if communication background (oral vs. sign language) influences reading comprehension strategies in deaf children.

Main Methods:

• Participants included two groups of deaf children (oral and sign language backgrounds) and a hearing control group, all around 6th grade.
• Children read sentences varying in syntactic complexity and semantic plausibility.
• Reading comprehension was assessed based on their understanding of the sentences.

Main Results:

• Deaf children, irrespective of their communication background, primarily relied on semantic processing of content words for reading comprehension.
• Syntactic structure processing played a minor role in the reading comprehension of deaf children.
• Hearing children showed a different pattern, indicating a greater reliance on syntactic processing compared to semantic processing.

Conclusions:

• Reading comprehension in prelingually deaf individuals is predominantly driven by semantic understanding.
• The findings highlight the importance of semantic processing for deaf readers, regardless of their primary language modality.
• Interventions aimed at improving reading comprehension in deaf children should consider strengthening semantic processing skills.