Analysis of reading strategies in deaf adults as a function of their language and meta-phonological skills

The first aim of this study was to examine the mechanisms used in reading sentences by deaf adults who had completed secondary or higher education. Previous data allowed us to hypothesize that they used the key word strategy, consisting of identifying (some of) the frequent content words, and deriving an overall representation of the sentence's meaning ignoring the function words. The results supported the hypothesis. The second aim was to establish the relationships between this strategy and the linguistic and phonological abilities of deaf participants. The results show that vocabulary increased with reading level, but syntax, evaluated with the use of function words, did not. This suggests that using the key word strategy during long periods of time increases knowledge of content words but not syntax, probably because function words are neglected by this strategy. The results also showed that the deaf participants had a fairly large orthographical lexicon. This implies that the extensive use of the key word strategy allows them to store lexical information. The next question was whether the written word representations of the deaf participants were memorized as mere logograms, or if they had been stored in connection with the phonological representations of the corresponding words. The metaphonological tasks conducted produced evidence indicating that deaf participants used both orthographic and phonological representations. A factor analysis of the metaphonological tasks together with reading and spelling confirmed that both factors were necessary to explain the whole variance in the deaf group.