The development of orthographic knowledge in prelingually deaf individuals: New insight from Arab readers

The present study was designed to further clarify whether impoverished phonological skills of prelingually deaf readers undermine their ability to process written words. The word reading skills of forty students with prelingual deafness recruited from two levels of education (primary school, mid/high school) and a chronologically age-matched hearing control group-all of them reading Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in a diglossic context-were examined with a research paradigm that required the categorization of written real words and paralleling pseudo-homophones. In general, findings suggest that despite severely impaired phonological decoding skills, prelingually deaf MSA readers eventually succeed to develop word reading skills that sustain word recognition with hearing-comparable efficiency. Linguistic representations underlying these skills seem to be of a nonphonological, most likely orthographic nature. Findings are discussed with reference to the validity of reading theories that assign a central role to phonology in the explanation of reading failure in individuals with prelingual deafness.