Immediate and delayed story recall by hearing and deaf children

Comprehension and retention of stories read by hearing children and by orally trained, congenitally, profoundly deaf children were studied. One normal and two experimentally confused stories were read by both groups, and recall was tested immediately after reading and following a week's delay. One experimentally confused story contained nonphonetic misspellings and was expected to cause difficulty for hearing readers; the other contained confused anaphoric references and was expected to cause difficulty for deaf readers. Amount recalled did not differ between the hearing and deaf groups on the normal story, but the deaf children were superior in amount recalled for both confused stories. However, the deaf children made significantly more distortions in their recall than did the hearing children. Orally trained deaf children may transfer the broad reconstructive strategies used for lip-reading purposes to reading style and thus engage in more guessing and reconstructive activity during reading than do hearing readers.