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Phonological sensitivity in severely and profoundly deaf readers of French

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Abstract

In order to become expert readers of an alphabetical language like French, students must develop and adequately use phonological knowledge. Considering that the phonological knowledge used in reading largely comes from knowledge of the oral language, what happens when the oral language is not accessible, as is the case for many deaf children? In this study, graphophonemic and syllabic processes in pseudoword reading were assessed with a similarity judgment task. Gestual deaf subjects aged 10–18 years old (N = 24) were compared to 24 age-matched hearing subjects. The results show that deaf readers are less sensitive to the graphemic and the syllabic structures of pseudo-words than hearing readers. In deaf subjects, the results are different than chance-level in the 13–15 and the 16–18-year-old groups. These results indicate that gestual deaf readers can develop phonological knowledge even in settings where sign language is promoted.

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Notes

  1. The reading comprehension test was created with the Zigzag technique developed by Ciesielski & Reinwein (1989) and used in many different studies as an experimental measure or as a control measure, as in this case (for example, Bastien, 1997; see also http://www.unites.uqam.ca/zigzag). The Zigzag technique consists in a reading activity activated by a segment-by-segment autopresentation, of the text to be constructed by the reader. The readers always have the choice between two items—an expected item and a distracter—and must select the expected one in order to activate the following part of the text. The anterior context then appears in a window on the computer. For this study, subjects had to read three texts of about 100 words each. The first one was a practice text. We used the average success rate of the two experimental texts as the reading score for each subject.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the subjects, their parents and the schools for generously participating in this study. We would also like to thank Audrey Dupont, Lynda Lelièvre and Marijo Tradif for their help in collecting and processing the data. We also thank Elisabeth Demont and Jean-Emile Gombert for their valuable comments on previous versions of this article. Finally, a special word of thanks goes out to Miguel Chagnon who helped with the statistical analyses.

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  1. Didactique, Université de Montréal, Pavillon Marie Victorin, 90 ave Vincent-d’Indy, Montreal, QC, Canada, H2V 2S9

    Daniel Daigle & Françoise Armand

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  1. Daniel Daigle
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  2. Françoise Armand
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Correspondence to Daniel Daigle.

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Appendixes

Appendix 1 Experimental material for the graphemic sensitivity task
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Appendix 2 Experimental material for the syllabic sensitivity task
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Daigle, D., Armand, F. Phonological sensitivity in severely and profoundly deaf readers of French. Read Writ 21, 699–717 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-007-9087-5

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