Thirty-two hearing impaired adolescents were administered a test instrument assessing comprehension of three anaphoric forms within conjoined sentences: repeated noun, personal pronouns, and null form. The null form was presented in two semantic environments. One environment allowed use of the object-subject deletion rule, a deviant rule found in the language of some hearing impaired students. In this environment, use of the deviant rule produced a conceptually acceptable event. Use of the deviant rule in the second environment, however, produced a conceptually unacceptable event. The null form anaphora in the semantically acceptable environment was significandy more difficult than the other anaphora. Implications for teaching language and development of reading materials for hearing impaired students are discussed.

Metalinguistic abilities of 20 hearing-impaired children between the ages of 4 and 10 years were assessed in this study. Children were asked to judge synonymy of sentence pairs presented in Signed English, Pidgin Sign English, and American Sign Language. Results indicated that none of these children had developed metalinguistic abilities in any of the sign language systems available to them. Sentence pairs with different meanings were easier than synonymous pairs, which suggests that their metalinguistic abilities are developing in a pattern similar to that of hearing children. Females performed significantly better than males.

This study examined the effectiveness of the graphic representation of signs in developing word identification skills for hearing impaired beginning readers. Twenty prelingually deaf students ranging in age from 6 years to 8 years, 11 months participated in two reading tasks: a word identification task and an immediate retention task. In the word identification task, two word lists were used 2 weeks apart: print plus sign (PS) and print only (PO). Students performed better in the PS condition than in the PO condition. In order to evaluate immediate retention, one word list in print-only form was administered to the students twice, once after the PS condition (PSR) and once after the PO condition (POR). Students retained more words following the PS condition.For hearing impaired individuals, the difficulty of acquiring adequate reading skills is attributed, in part, to the nature of written English. Because alphabetic writing is a coded visual representation of speech, "both the code (printed symbols) and the language itself (standard English) are unfamiliar" (Quigley, 1982, p. 96) to hearing impaired individuals as they do not have the auditory channel to experience the spoken language fully.Learning to read involves "the process of transfer from the auditory signs for language signals, which the [hearing] child has already learned, to the new visual signs for the same signals" (Mattingly, 1972, p. 134). Conversely, the translation of visual signs (i.e., print) into the corresponding spoken form has been termed phonological or speech recoding (Hirsh-Pasek & Treiman, 1982). Speech recoding can assist readers in word identification (Hirsh-Pasek 8c Treiman, 1982). Using spelling-sound correspondence rules to approximate a word's pronunciation can assist children in identifying unknown printed words as long as those words are in the children's spoken vocabulary (Kleiman, 1975;Mattingly, 1972). This, in turn, increases their reading vocabulary (Johnson & Pearson, 1984).Speech recoding also assists children in retaining early parts of the text while processing later portions (Hirsh-Pasek, 1987; Treiman 8c Hirsh-Pasek, 1983). In a short-term memory task for visually presented stimuli, Conrad (1964) found that hearing subjects verbalized, or recoded, the stimuli into a speech-based code. The at FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIV on August 25, 2015 sed.sagepub.com Downloaded from

This study investigated the factors used by teachers of the hearing impaired in identifying the reading interests of their students. It also examined the accuracy of their judgments in comparison to students ' responses on a reading interest inventory. Twenty teachers of the hearing impaired were asked to judge the top two reading interest areas for each of the 82 students. They also described the factors they used in making their judgments. The 82 hearing-impaired students completed a reading interest inventory. Their results were compared then with their teachers' judgments. Results indicated that teachers were only moderately accurate in judging their students' reading interests.

A 50-item reading interest inventory was administered to 115 hearing-impaired students and 72 hearing students between the ages of 9 and 12. Each item included a fictitious title and illustrated annotations. Students indicated media preferences (print vs. television) and degree of interest on a 3-point Likert scale. Items were grouped into five clusters: Excitement, Social Empathy, Informational, Recreational, and Fantasy. Results showed that hearing-impaired students had a broader base of interests than their hearing peers. Sex was a significant factor affecting hearing students' cluster choices, but was not as pervasive for the hearing-impaired students.