The Importance of Morphological Knowledge in the Reading Comprehension Difficulties in a Highly Agglutinative Language: Evidence from Poor Comprehenders.

This study examined the importance of morphological knowledge in the reading comprehension difficulties of poor comprehenders reading in a highly agglutinative language, Turkish. Participants were 56 students recruited from the second and third grades. In the assessment process, we applied three experimental paradigms addressing the participants' morphological and morpho-syntactical knowledge at the lexical and the supralexical levels. Data were collected in individual sessions and analyzed by running a series of GLM ANOVAs and calculating the Spearman-Brown correlation coefficient. Findings suggest morphological knowledge is an important indicator of reading comprehension difficulties in Turkish, a highly agglutinative language. The acquisition of adequate reading comprehension seems to be modified by particularities of the morphological knowledge.

Deaf native signers are better readers than nonnative signers: myth or truth?

The central aim of this study was to clarify whether sign language (SL) nativeness is a significant factor in determining prelingually deaf individuals' reading skills and whether its contribution is modified by the reader's orthographic background. A second aim was to elucidate similarities and differences between native and nonnative signers in processing written information at different processing levels in order to understand how SL nativeness sustains the reading process, if at all. Participants were 176 students with prelingual deafness recruited from two education levels (6th-7th graders and 9th-10th graders) and three orthographic backgrounds (Hebrew, German, and Turkish). Sixty-six students were native and the remainder nonnative signers. They were tested with a battery of eight experimental paradigms, each assessing their information processing skills in a specific reading-related or reading-unrelated domain. Findings corroborate SL nativeness enhancing the reading process in some regard. However, its contribution was not found to scaffold the structural processing of a written text to turn reading into a tool for learning. Rather, gains were restricted to facilitating processing written words from a perceptual to a conceptual level. Evidence suggests that compared with other determining factors, the contribution of SL nativeness to proficient reading may be rather marginal.

A comparison of the letter-processing skills of hearing and deaf readers: evidence from five orthographies.

This study was designed to examine the letter-processing skills of prelingually deaf and hearing students recruited from five different orthographic backgrounds (Hebrew, Arabic, English, German, and Turkish). Participants were 128 hearing and 133 deaf 6th-7th graders. They were tested with a same/different paradigm that assessed their ability to process letters under perceptual and conceptual conditions. Findings suggest that the letter-processing skills of deaf readers from some orthographic backgrounds may be underdeveloped in comparison to hearing counterparts. The finding that such letter-processing deficits were restricted to readers of some but not all of the tested orthographies warrants the conclusion that prelingual deafness, per se, does not impede the development of effective letter processing. Evidence for this study is discussed with reference to potential orthography-inherent and educational factors that may explain the existence of letter-processing deficits found in some of the prelingually deaf readers examined in this study.

Factors distinguishing skilled and less skilled deaf readers: evidence from four orthographies.

This study aims to enhance understanding of the factors underlying variance in the reading comprehension skills of prelingually deaf individuals. Participants were 213 sixth through tenth graders with prelingual deafness recruited from four orthographic backgrounds (Hebrew, Arabic, English, and German) and allocated to three distinct reading profiles (levels). A sentence comprehension test manipulating the semantic plausibility of sentences and a word processing experiment requiring rapid determination of the semantic relationship between two real words or between a real word and a pseudohomophonic letter string were used to determine the factors distinguishing skilled from less skilled deaf readers. Findings point to deficits in structural (syntactic) knowledge and deficient knowledge structures, rather than differences in phonological processing skills, as making that distinction. Moreover, the acquisition of such knowledge seems to be modified by particularities of the read orthography.