Relationship of word knowledge to word frequency in young adult deaf students

This report describes research that has been undertaken to determine the relationship between word knowledge and word frequency (occurrence in print) in a deaf population. A matching test was designed and administered to 162 deaf students entering the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in the summer of 1976. The results of the study indicate that there exists a relationship between word frequency and word knowledge in a deaf population. The reliability and validity of the technique was tested and seems to provide adequate support for this approach to assessing the vocabulary level of deaf students.