The aim of this study is to examine the mechanisms used by deaf children with and without cochlear implants (CIs) to read sentences and the linguistic bases (vocabulary and syntax) underlying those reading mechanisms. Previous studies have shown that deaf persons read sentences using the key word strategy (KWS), which consists of identifying some frequent content words and ignoring the function words. The present results show that deaf children, including those wearing CIs from an early age, do use the KWS. It is also shown that this tendency is related with a linguistic deficiency, especially with a poor ability to deal with function words. Furthermore, the age of implantation, and the degree of hearing loss for children without CIs, plays an important role in using the KWS. Some pedagogical consequences of this situation are considered.

No abstract

The authors examined the relationship between cochlear implants (CIs) and reading acquisition and attempted to determine the part played by phonological and orthographic resources in this task. Four groups of Spanish-speaking deaf children were examined: children with either early-or lateimplanted CIs, and children without CIs who had either moderate or profound hearing loss. A hearing group was included to control for age and reading level. Reading, spelling, and three metaphonological abilities were evaluated. The results showed that the reading levels achieved by deaf children strongly depend on phonological ability. Age at implantation and, for deaf children without CIs, degree of hearing loss, play important roles in this ability. The results further suggest that both deaf and hearing children develop phonological representations of words, a skill that contributes to reading and spelling acquisition. Reciprocally, reading itself contributes to the elaboration of phonological and orthographic representations.

This article examines the cognitive mechanisms involved in word spelling in Spanish, a consistent/shallow orthographic system, as opposed to an inconsistent/deep system. The article examines the two basic spelling mechanics according to the dual-route modelthe phoneme-grapheme route and the orthographic routeas well as two additional mechanisms, one exploiting the sub-lexical orthographic regularities and the other morphological knowledge. Although there is insufficient evidence to allow definitive conclusions, it is suggested that the mechanisms involved in word spelling are qualitatively the same in all orthographic systems, whatever their degree of consistency-depth. The quantitative differences observed show that consistent systems such as Spanish are acquired more rapidly than less consistent systems.