Written narratives of deaf and hearing students: story recall and inference

The ability of deaf high school students to recall propositions and inferences from prose was examined and compared with that of hearing students. Students were asked to read and then write a given story. The hearing students recalled significantly larger numbers of propositions than deaf students, but both deaf and hearing students recalled similar numbers of story inferences in their written narratives. The interaction between the deaf students' reading comprehension levels and their narratives revealed that better readers were more accurate in recalling explicit propositional information but were not different in recalling implicit content. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.