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