Orthographic and Phonological Preview Benefits: Parafoveal Processing in Skilled and Less-Skilled Deaf Readers

Abstract

Many deaf individuals do not develop the high-level reading skills that will allow them to fully take part into society. To attempt to explain this widespread difficulty in the deaf population, much research has honed in on the use of phonological codes during reading. The hypothesis that the use of phonological codes is associated with good reading skills in deaf readers, though not well supported, still lingers in the literature. We investigated skilled and less-skilled adult deaf readers’ processing of orthographic and phonological codes in parafoveal vision during reading by monitoring their eye movements and using the boundary paradigm. Orthographic preview benefits were found in early measures of reading for skilled hearing, skilled deaf, and less-skilled deaf readers, but only skilled hearing readers processed phonological codes in parafoveal vision. Crucially, skilled and less-skilled deaf readers showed a very similar pattern of preview benefits during reading. These results support the notion that reading difficulties in deaf adults are not linked to their failure to activate phonological codes during reading.

Parafoveal activation of sign translation previews among deaf readers during the reading of Chinese sentences

“…Together with previous findings (Bélanger, Mayberry, & Rayner, 2013a;Morford et al, 2011;Yan et al, 2015), our results suggest that deaf readers are flexible in the ways that they choose to code words. …”

“…Recent experiments have further tested the types of information that can be parafoveally obtained by deaf readers: Bélanger, Mayberry, and Rayner (2013a) provided no evidence for parafoveal phonological processing among deaf readers. It is possible that given the lack of auditory input, deaf readers may develop a different coding strategy and/or more direct access to semantics.…”

“…However, some deaf readers can reach a relatively high reading level, suggesting that they may use a different coding system in lexical processing. Previous studies have demonstrated that deaf readers do not make use of parafoveal phonological information as hearing readers do (Bélanger, Mayberry, & Rayner, 2013a), and that Chinese deaf readers develop more direct access to parafoveal semantics (Yan, Pan, Bélanger, & Shu, 2015a). Although these studies have contributed to the understanding of lexical processing for deaf readers, it remains an open question whether or not some types of parafoveal information uniquely contribute to lexical access among deaf readers.…”

Phonological and orthographic coding in deaf skilled readers

“…For example, Bélanger, Baum and Mayberry (2012) concluded that skilled deaf readers might activate visual, orthographic and semantic codes during reading, but not phonological codes in French. Furthermore, Bélanger, Mayberry and Rayner (2013) investigated the phonological and orthographic preview benefit in parafovea in English readers.…”

Phonological coding during reading.

“…Instead they observed a reliance on orthographic codes for word recognition (faster lexical decision latencies following O+P+ than O−P+ primes) and short-term memory maintenance (better recall of words from O+P+ lists than O−P+ lists). Relatedly, both skilled and less skilled deaf readers show orthographic preview benefit but not phonological preview benefit during English sentence reading (Bélanger, Mayberry, & Rayner, 2013). …”