Another look at the STM capacity of prelingually deafened individuals and its relation to reading comprehension

The study investigated the short-term recall of serially presented verbal(izable) information by prelingually deafened individuals and hearing individuals, and reconsidered how short-term memory (STM) is linked with their reading skills and their memory coding strategies. A computer-controlled paradigm calling for written ordered recall of 12 lists of 8 consecutively displayed Hebrew nouns was used to assess STM capacity. Forty-nine students with prelingual deafness (mean grade 6.9) and 39 hearing students (mean grade 6.5) participated in the experiment. Twenty-seven of the participants with deafness were raised according to an oral philosophy. The remaining 22 participants from the deaf group used sign language as their preferred communication code. In general, the findings suggest that neither discrepancy in the ordered short-term recall of verbal materials nor discrepancies in reading comprehension are directly assignable to differences in the memory coding strategies of prelingually deafened and hearing individuals. If such functional discrepancies develop, they reflect absent or insufficiently internalized knowledge.