Interactions of Cognitive Processes and Reading in Deaf Learners: Understanding Differences.
Marc Marcharschark.

One of the most frequently cited and well-documented challenges facing deaf children is the ability to read the language of their home country.

Most investigators have focused on specific components of the reading process : phonological decoding, vocabulary knowledge, syntactic abilities, and discourse processes. While relative fluencies in these skills undoubtedly have profound effects on the reading abilities of deaf children, it is unclear whether difficulties seen in these domains should be seen as causes or effects. This presentation will describe ways in which reading-related cognitive abilities of deaf children may differ from those of hearing children and may vary more broadly across deaf children than they do across hearing children. It will be suggested that in order to understand the reading difficulties of deaf children – and to understand the remarkable lack of success that educators and researchers have had in improving the reading success of deaf students – we must look at cognitive (and social factors) as well as reading per se. several often-claimed barriers to deaf children’s reading will be shown to be unfounded, while other, perhaps more subtle barriers will be examined in terms of recent research findings.