Orthographic structure and deaf spelling errors: syllables, letter frequency, and speech

Contribution of Lexical Quality and Sign Language Variables to Reading Comprehension

The lexical quality hypothesis proposes that the quality of phonological, orthographic, and semantic representations impacts reading comprehension. In Study 1, we evaluated the contributions of lexical quality to reading comprehension in 97 deaf and 98 hearing adults matched for reading ability. While phonological awareness was a strong predictor for hearing readers, for deaf readers, orthographic precision and semantic knowledge, not phonology, predicted reading comprehension (assessed by two different tests). For deaf readers, the architecture of the reading system adapts by shifting reliance from (coarse-grained) phonological representations to high-quality orthographic and semantic representations. In Study 2, we examined the contribution of American Sign Language (ASL) variables to reading comprehension in 83 deaf adults. Fingerspelling (FS) and ASL comprehension skills predicted reading comprehension. We suggest that FS might reinforce orthographic-to-semantic mappings and that sign language comprehension may serve as a linguistic basis for the development of skilled reading in deaf signers.

Lexical Competition Without Phonology: Masked Orthographic Neighbor Priming With Deaf Readers

Skilled reading is thought to rely on well-specified lexical representations that compete during visual word recognition. The establishment of these lexical representations is assumed to be driven by phonology. To test the role of phonology, we examined the prime lexicality effect (PLE), the index of lexical competition in signing deaf (N = 28) and hearing (N = 28) adult readers of Hungarian matched in age and education. We found no PLE for deaf readers even when reading skills were controlled for. Surprisingly, the hearing controls also showed reduced PLE; however, the effect was modulated by reading skill. More skilled hearing readers showed PLE, while more skilled deaf readers did not. These results suggest that phonology contributes to lexical competition; however, high-quality lexical representations are not necessarily built through phonology in deaf readers.

Masked ERP repetition priming in deaf and hearing readers

Deaf readers provide unique insights into how the reading circuit is modified by altered linguistic and sensory input. We investigated whether reading-matched deaf and hearing readers (n = 62) exhibit different ERP effects associated with orthographic to phonological mapping (N250) or lexico-semantic processes (N400). In a visual masked priming paradigm, participants performed a go/no-go categorization task; target words were preceded by repeated or unrelated primes. Prime duration and word frequency were manipulated. Hearing readers exhibited typical N250 and N400 priming effects with 50 ms primes (greater negativity for unrelated primes) and smaller effects with 100 ms primes. Deaf readers showed a surprising reversed priming effect with 50 ms primes (greater negativity for related primes), and more typical N250 and N400 effects with 100 ms primes. Correlation results suggested deaf readers with poorer phonological skills drove this effect. We suggest that weak phonological activation may create orthographic "repetition enhancement" or form/lexical competition in deaf readers.

A Multilinguistic Spelling Analysis of Children who are Hard of Hearing

Spelling in writing samples was compared between children who are hard of hearing (HH) (n = 142) and their peers with typical hearing (TH) (n = 72) in second and fourth grade. The same analyses were then conducted comparing groups of children who are HH with different levels of aided audibility. Compared to children with TH, children who are HH produced fewer misspelled words (p = .041, d = .42) at second grade but performed similarly in fourth grade (p = .943, d = .02). Compared to peers with TH, children who are HH demonstrated similar distributions of errors in roots but some differences in the distribution of errors for affixes. Different levels of aided audibility among children who are HH were not associated with significant differences in spelling accuracy at both grades. However, second-grade children with poorer aided audibility produced significantly more phonological omissions (p = .005, r = .32) and orthographic consonant errors for monomorphemic words (p = .001, r = .37), as well as more orthographic consonant errors for and affixes (p = .015, r = .28).

Letter Features as Predictors of Letter-Name Acquisition in Four Languages with Three Scripts

To expand our understanding of script-general and script-specific principles in the learning of letter names, we examined how three characteristics of alphabet letters-their frequency in printed materials, order in the alphabet, and visual similarity to other letters-relate to children's letter-name knowledge in four languages with three distinct scripts (English [N = 318; M age = 4.90], Portuguese [N = 366; M age = 5.80], Korean [N = 168; M age = 5.48], and Hebrew [N = 645; M age = 5.42]). Explanatory item response modeling analysis showed that the frequency of letters in printed materials was consistently related to letter difficulty across the four languages. There were also moderation effects for letter difficulty in English and Korean, and for discriminatory power of letters in Korean. The results suggest that exposure to letters as measured by letter frequency is a language-general mechanism in the learning of alphabet letters.

What Do Spelling Errors Tell Us about Deaf Learners of French?

For deaf students, spelling acquisition is a considerable challenge, especially because the spelling code is based on an oral language to which most of them have limited access. Most studies conducted with deaf students have reported that they lag behind their hearing peers. However, few studies have used a fine-grained error classification grid. The use of such a grid makes it possible to draw a precise portrait of writers' orthographic knowledge. The purpose of this study was to describe the spelling skills of 19 deaf students (Mage = 10.9 years) and to compare their errors with those of 20 hearing students of the same age and 17 younger hearing students at the same reading level. The results indicate that deaf students are not quantitatively different from hearing students but that their errors are qualitatively different from those of hearing students.

A Multilinguistic Approach to Evaluating Student Spelling in Writing Samples

Purpose

Spelling is a critical component of literacy and language arts that can negatively influence other aspects of written composition. This clinical focus article describes a spelling error classification system that can be used to identify underlying linguistic deficits that contribute to students' spelling errors. The system is designed to take advantage of the linguistic expertise of speech-language pathologists to efficiently assess student errors in written compositions that are generated as a component of everyday classroom instruction.

Method

A review of the literature was conducted regarding spelling as a component of literacy and language arts, the development of spelling, and the linguistic contributions to spelling. Then, existing criterion-referenced measures of spelling simple and morphologically complex words were reviewed, and a new, manual technique for analyzing spelling in student written compositions was created.

Conclusions

The language expertise of speech-language pathologists enables them to readily evaluate the phonological, orthographic, and morphological errors in student misspellings, in order to identify specific underlying linguistic deficits and plan targeted interventions. The error classification system provides speech-language pathologists with a tool that is both simple and time efficient and, thus, may help increase their confidence and ability in addressing the spelling needs of students.

Spelling in oral deaf and hearing dyslexic children: A comparison of phonologically plausible errors

A written single word spelling to dictation test and a single word reading test were given to 68 severe-profoundly oral deaf 10-11-year-old children and 20 hearing children with a diagnosis of dyslexia. The literacy scores of the deaf children and the hearing children with dyslexia were lower than expected for children of their age and did not differ from each other. Three quarters of the spelling errors of hearing children with dyslexia compared with just over half the errors of the oral deaf group were phonologically plausible. Expressive vocabulary and speech intelligibility predicted the percentage of phonologically plausible errors in the deaf group only. Implications of findings for the phonological decoding self-teaching model and for supporting literacy development are discussed.

Representation of letter position in single-word reading: evidence from acquired dyslexia

Visual word recognition requires information about the positions as well as the identities of the letters in a word. This study addresses representation of letter position at prelexical levels of the word recognition process. We present evidence from an acquired dyslexic patient, L.H.D., who perseverates letters in single-word reading tasks: Far more often than expected by chance, L.H.D.'s reading responses include letters from preceding responses (e.g., SAILOR read as SAILOG immediately after FLAG was read correctly). Analyses carried out over two large data sets compared the positions of perseverated letters (e.g., the G in SAILOG) with the positions of the corresponding "source" letters (e.g., the G in FLAG). The analyses assessed the extent to which the perseverations preserved source position as defined by various theories of letter position representation. The results provided strong evidence for graded both-edges position representations, in which the position of each letter is encoded coarsely relative to both the beginning and the end of the word. Alternative position representation schemes, including letter-context and orthosyllabic schemes, were not supported.

The analysis of perseverations in acquired dysgraphia reveals the internal structure of orthographic representations

At a minimum, our long-term memory representations of word spellings consist of ordered strings of single letter identities. While letter identity and position must certainly be represented, it is by no means obvious that this is the only information that is included in orthographic representations, nor that representations necessarily have a one-dimensional "flat" structure. Evidence favours the alternative hypothesis that orthographic representations, much like phonological ones, are internally rich, complex multidimensional structures, though many questions remain regarding the precise nature of the internal complexity of orthographic representations. In this investigation, we test competing accounts of the internal structure of orthographic representations by analysing the perseveration errors produced by an individual with acquired dysgraphia, L.S.S. The analysis of perseveration errors provides a novel and powerful method for investigating the question of the independence of different representational components. The results provide clear support for the hypothesis that letter quantity and syllabic role information are associated with, but separable from, letter identity information. Furthermore, the results indicate that digraphs-letter pairs associated with a single phoneme (e.g., the SH in FISH)-are units of orthographic representation. These results contribute substantially to the further development of the multidimensional hypothesis, providing both new and converging evidence regarding the nature of the internal complexity of orthographic representations.

Teachers' perceptions of promoting sign language phonological awareness in an ASL/English bilingual program

The National Reading Panel emphasizes that spoken language phonological awareness (PA) developed at home and school can lead to improvements in reading performance in young children. However, research indicates that many deaf children are good readers even though they have limited spoken language PA. Is it possible that some deaf students benefit from teachers who promote sign language PA instead? The purpose of this qualitative study is to examine teachers' beliefs and instructional practices related to sign language PA. A thematic analysis is conducted on 10 participant interviews at an ASL/English bilingual school for the deaf to understand their views and instructional practices. The findings reveal that the participants had strong beliefs in developing students' structural knowledge of signs and used a variety of instructional strategies to build students' knowledge of sign structures in order to promote their language and literacy skills.

Lexical processing in deaf readers: an FMRI investigation of reading proficiency

Individuals with significant hearing loss often fail to attain competency in reading orthographic scripts which encode the sound properties of spoken language. Nevertheless, some profoundly deaf individuals do learn to read at age-appropriate levels. The question of what differentiates proficient deaf readers from less-proficient readers is poorly understood but topical, as efforts to develop appropriate and effective interventions are needed. This study uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine brain activation in deaf readers (N = 21), comparing proficient (N = 11) and less proficient (N = 10) readers’ performance in a widely used test of implicit reading. Proficient deaf readers activated left inferior frontal gyrus and left middle and superior temporal gyrus in a pattern that is consistent with regions reported in hearing readers. In contrast, the less-proficient readers exhibited a pattern of response characterized by inferior and middle frontal lobe activation (right>left) which bears some similarity to areas reported in studies of logographic reading, raising the possibility that these individuals are using a qualitatively different mode of orthographic processing than is traditionally observed in hearing individuals reading sound-based scripts. The evaluation of proficient and less-proficient readers points to different modes of processing printed English words. Importantly, these preliminary findings allow us to begin to establish the impact of linguistic and educational factors on the neural systems that underlie reading achievement in profoundly deaf individuals.

Deaf and hearing children's plural noun spelling

The present study examines deaf and hearing children's spelling of plural nouns. Severe literacy impairments are well documented in the deaf, which are believed to be a consequence of phonological awareness limitations. Fifty deaf (mean chronological age 13;10 years, mean reading age 7;5 years) and 50 reading-age-matched hearing children produced spellings of regular, semiregular, and irregular plural nouns in Experiment 1 and nonword plurals in Experiment 2. Deaf children performed reading-age appropriately on rule-based (regular and semiregular) plurals but were significantly less accurate at spelling irregular plurals. Spelling of plural nonwords and spelling error analyses revealed clear evidence for use of morphology. Deaf children used morphological generalization to a greater degree than their reading-age-matched hearing counterparts. Also, hearing children combined use of phonology and morphology to guide spelling, whereas deaf children appeared to use morphology without phonological mediation. Therefore, use of morphology in spelling can be independent of phonology and is available to the deaf despite limited experience with spoken language. Indeed, deaf children appear to be learning about morphology from the orthography. Education on more complex morphological generalization and exceptions may be highly beneficial not only for the deaf but also for other populations with phonological awareness limitations.

Processing orthographic structure: associations between print and fingerspelling

Two lexical decision experiments are reported that investigate whether the same segmentation strategies are used for reading printed English words and fingerspelled words (in American Sign Language). Experiment 1 revealed that both deaf and hearing readers performed better when written words were segmented with respect to an orthographically defined syllable (the Basic Orthographic Syllable Structure [BOSS]) than with a phonologically defined syllable. Correlation analyses revealed that better deaf readers were more sensitive to orthographic syllable representations, whereas segmentation strategy did not differentiate the better hearing readers. In contrast to Experiment 1, Experiment 2 revealed better performance by deaf participants when fingerspelled words were segmented at the phonological syllable boundary. We suggest that English mouthings that often accompany fingerspelled words promote a phonological parsing preference for fingerspelled words. In addition, fingerspelling ability was significantly correlated with reading comprehension and vocabulary skills. This pattern of results indicates that the association between fingerspelling and print for adult deaf readers is not based on shared segmentation strategies. Rather, we suggest that both good readers and good fingerspellers have established strong representations of English and that fingerspelling may aid in the development and maintenance of English vocabulary.

Reading achievement in relation to phonological coding and awareness in deaf readers: a meta-analysis

The relation between reading ability and phonological coding and awareness (PCA) skills in individuals who are severely and profoundly deaf was investigated with a meta-analysis. From an initial set of 230 relevant publications, 57 studies were analyzed that experimentally tested PCA skills in 2,078 deaf participants. Half of the studies found statistically significant evidence for PCA skills and half did not. A subset of 25 studies also tested reading proficiency and showed a wide range of effect sizes. Overall PCA skills predicted 11% of the variance in reading proficiency in the deaf participants. Other possible modulating factors, such as task type and reading grade level, did not explain the remaining variance. In 7 studies where it was measured, language ability predicted 35% of the variance in reading proficiency. These meta-analytic results indicate that PCA skills are a low to moderate predictor of reading achievement in deaf individuals and that other factors, most notably language ability, have a greater influence on reading development, as has been found to be the case in the hearing population.

Representation of letter position in spelling: evidence from acquired dysgraphia

The graphemic representations that underlie spelling performance must encode not only the identities of the letters in a word, but also the positions of the letters. This study investigates how letter position information is represented. We present evidence from two dysgraphic individuals, CM and LSS, who perseverate letters when spelling: that is, letters from previous spelling responses intrude into subsequent responses. The perseverated letters appear more often than expected by chance in the same position in the previous and subsequent responses. We used these errors to address the question of how letter position is represented in spelling. In a series of analyses we determined how often the perseveration errors produced maintain position as defined by a number of alternative theories of letter position encoding proposed in the literature. The analyses provide strong evidence that the grapheme representations used in spelling encode letter position such that position is represented in a graded manner based on distance from both-edges of the word.