Figurative language and reading comprehension in American deaf and hard-of-hearing children: textual interactions

The limited evidence on figurative language in deaf children, as well as 'professional intuitions', has led those who teach them to conclude that reading comprehension will be significantly complicated by figurative language. However, there are disagreements among practitioners as to how best to manage figurative language when it appears in text. Generally, some sort of textual modification is made, although those for and against 'simplified texts' are split on this issue. Those who favour them suggest either that complex vocabulary and syntax be reconstructed or that they be gradually introduced. However, reformulations are seldom standard nor are the figurative tropes such as metaphor, simile, personification etc. systematically introduced. Those against simplified texts argue that the problem of figurative language control is not one of linguistic complexity, but one of cognitive processing: deaf children can grasp inferred or indirect meaning so long as the referential domain is made clear. Such comprehension comes by way of demonstration, practice and feedback and figurative language need not present a special problem. In this present study, 14 deaf and hard-of-hearing children and youths who had been randomly assigned to one of two groups were given an original story entitled 'Peaches the Cat' and asked to read it. One group read a literal version of the story and one group read a figurative version in which all textual answers to the question were masked with figurative phraseology. Both groups answered the questions above a chance level and the figurative version did not prove to be more difficult than the literal version. The two groups were comparable on hearing loss and on reading and language ability.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)