The written recall of printed stories by severely deaf children

The written recall of printed stories by a sample (N = 16) of severely deaf children (mean age 13:3) was compared with that of a slow-reading hearing sample. The deaf children recalled as much, or more, of the story content. In general, however, their recall contained more distortions of the kind that indicates a break-down of the temporal structure of the story. The writing of one story in Sign word order proved to have a facilitatory effect on close recall by the deaf children, but not upon their free recall (as measured by either the amount recalled or the number of distortions), thus clarifying a well-confirmed finding in the literature. The deaf had even more difficulty than the slow-hearing in employing a "top-down", schema-driven strategy at the whole passage level.