Phonological Awareness and Reading Proficiency in Adults with Profound Deafness

This study investigated differences in the phonological knowledge and reading skill of deaf adults using three experimental conditions that tested sensitivity to syllables, rhyme, and phonemes. Analysis of response latencies and accuracy in the three awareness tasks demonstrated that skilled deaf readers had superior phonological awareness skill to that of less-skilled readers and showed less reliance on orthography when making their phonological judgments. Rhyme had greater independent predictive strength than syllable or phoneme awareness for reading comprehension. Phoneme awareness did not contribute independently to either reading comprehension or word reading, but it did independently predict application of grapheme-phoneme correspondences.