This article reports on a longitudinal study of reading progress in a group of five-year-old deaf children and a group of hearing controls. All children were prereaders at the beginning of the study and the IQ of the two groups were matched. The deaf children varied considerably on a number of measures, including implicit phonological awareness, oral ability, and familiarity with British Sign Language and fingerspelling. Overall, the deaf children made significantly less reading progress than their hearing peers over the first year of schooling, and they also scored significantly lower on the test of rime and onset awareness. However, considerable variation in the reading progress of the deaf children was positively correlated with oral skills, rime/onset awareness, and language comprehension. Language comprehension, itself, was positively correlated with signing and fingerspelling. The deaf children were assessed again one year later, when learning to read continued to be very delayed, and the pattern of correlation was essentially the same. The implications of these findings for the education of deaf children are discussed.

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A comparison was made between prelingually deaf and hearing children matched on reading age (between 7:0 and 7:11 years) in order to examine possible differences in reading performance. The deaf children all had a severe or profound hearing loss and were receiving special education in either a school or a unit for the deaf. The experimental tasks used a lexical decision task involving the reading of single words. The employment of phonology in reading was investigated by comparing reading performance on regular and irregular words and by comparing reading of homophonic versus non-homophonic nonwords. Both tasks revealed that hearing participants were much more affected by regularity and homophony, suggesting a much greater reliance on assembled phonological recoding. These results are discussed in terms of deaf readers relying on lexical access for reading print.

Background. Children who have a second language at home and report more usage of this language in various contexts ought reciprocally to be less proficient in English as frequency of exposure to English is reduced. Similarly there should be a two‐way directional influence between oral vocabulary and reading development. Samples. A group of 40 bilingual Asian children was compared with an age‐matched mixed race (but with only one Asian child) monolingual group of 24 children. Mean age was 8 years for both groups (range 7; 6 to 8; 6 years) and socioeconomic status was low. Group allocation was based on a specially devised Language Preference Questionnaire (LPQ) examining different contexts of language use (e.g., during numerical analysis). Method. Standardised tests of non‐verbal intelligence, vocabulary, basic reading, reading comprehension and the LPQ were given. Results. Controlling for non‐verbal intelligence, there was a marked difference in receptive oral vocabulary and a weaker difference in reading ability between the two groups. The LPQ showed that bilingual children who reported thinking in their parental language had poorer English vocabulary development than bilingual children who preferred to think in English. Conclusions. These findings are discussed in terms of either an effect of frequency of exposure to language or in terms of differences in phonological development between the two groups. The contrasting differences in the effects of bilingualism on vocabulary and reading suggest that in this particular socioeconomic setting parents of both groups do not have substantial impact on reading, but they do have an influence on the development of English oral vocabulary.