Comparison of reading comprehension task performance for deaf and hearing readers

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Psychology
• Deaf Education

Background:

• Understanding language processing in deaf individuals is crucial for educational and therapeutic interventions.
• Comparing deaf and hearing populations on standardized tasks helps identify cognitive differences and similarities.
• Reading comprehension is a key area of focus for assessing language abilities.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare the performance, internal consistency, and variability of deaf and hearing subjects on language production and recognition tasks.
• To investigate the impact of lookback conditions on task performance for both groups.
• To identify specific task types where performance differences between deaf and hearing individuals are most pronounced.

Main Methods:

• Fifty deaf and 50 hearing subjects with comparable SAT reading comprehension scores participated.
• Subjects completed two production tasks (cloze, free-response) and two recognition tasks (multiple-choice, modified-cloze).
• Tasks were assessed under both lookback and no-lookback conditions to evaluate memory recall strategies.

Main Results:

• No significant differences were found in task consistency and variability between deaf and hearing groups.
• Deaf subjects demonstrated a lower mean performance level across tasks compared to hearing subjects.
• The most substantial performance disparities were observed in production tasks and under lookback conditions.

Conclusions:

• While cognitive processes underlying language task execution appear similar (consistency, variability), overall performance levels differ between deaf and hearing individuals.
• Language production and tasks requiring memory recall (lookback) present greater challenges for deaf learners.
• Findings suggest a need for targeted support in language production and memory strategies for deaf students.