Orthographic Learning in French-Speaking Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children

Children are assumed to acquire orthographic representations during autonomous reading by decoding new written words. The present study investigates how deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children build new orthographic representations compared to typically hearing (TH) children.

Twenty-nine DHH children, from 7.8 to 13.5 years old, with moderate-to-profound hearing loss, matched for reading level and chronological age to TH controls, were exposed to 10 pseudowords (novel words) in written stories. Then, they performed a spelling task and an orthographic recognition task on these new words.

In the spelling task, we found no difference in accuracy, but a difference in errors emerged between the two groups: Phonologically plausible errors were less common in DHH children than in TH children. In the recognition task, DHH children were better than TH children at recognizing target pseudowords. Phonological strategies seemed to be used less by DHH than by TH children who very often chose phonological distractors.

Both groups created sufficiently detailed orthographic representations to complete the tasks, which support the self-teaching hypothesis. DHH children used phonological information in both tasks but could use more orthographic cues than TH children to build up orthographic representations. Using the combination of a spelling task and a recognition task, as well as analyzing the nature of errors, in this study, provides a methodological implication for further understanding of underlying cognitive processes.