Examination of Deaf and Hearing Students' Reading Comprehension Strategies in the Fifth Grade of Elementary School

Abstract

Previous research showed that deaf individuals in compare to hearing ones perform weaker in syntactic processing. Therefore, they are expected to compensate for this defect through using their background knowledge. The aims of this study were to investigate the effect of deafness on the participants’ ability to comprehend subject relative clauses, and to determine their strategies in comprehending the semantically plausible subject relative clauses and semantically implausible ones within the theoretical framework of Interactive-Compensatory Model (Stanovich, 1980). The performance of 4 profound deaf students in fifth grades as the experimental group and 4 healthy hearing students as the control group was studied in a cross-sectional research to evaluate their comprehension of semantically plausible subject relative clauses and semantically implausible ones. The findings of this research showed that there was no significant difference between the performance of the deaf and hearing participants in comprehending semantically plausible sentences (p>0/05). However, a significant difference between the performance of the two groups was observed with respect to their comprehension of semantically implausible sentences (p<0/05). Based on the analysis of the data, it was concluded that the difficulty that the deaf experimental group experienced in processing semantically implausible subject relative sentences can be attributed to their use of a top-down strategy in comprehending these syntactic structures.

Keywords

• deafness
• reading comprehension
• reading strategy
• syntactic processing
• subject and object relative sentences