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The Reading Comprehension Failure of Turkish Prelingually Deaf Readers: Evidence from Semantic and Syntactic Processing

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Abstract

This study aimed to determine the factors underlying the reading comprehension (RC) failure of prelingually deaf Turkish readers. Participants were 77 individuals with prelingual deafness and a hearing control of 78 normally developing hearing individuals selected from three distinct levels of education (3rd–4th graders = elementary; 6th–7th graders = middle; 9th–10th graders = high). We applied an experimental paradigm manipulating the semantic plausibility and syntactic complexity of sentences to compare RC at the sentence level. In line with findings reported for prelingually deaf individuals reading in other orthographies, the deaf participants tested in the present study manifested rather alarmingly impoverished RC skills in comparison to their hearing counterparts. The findings suggest that this reading failure is rooted in an apparent deficiency in the ability to recruit syntactic and prior knowledge to make sense of what they read. The evidence further suggests that such deficits prove strikingly resistant to years of formal oral education.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Special Education, University of Haifa (IL), Haifa, Israel

    Paul Miller

  2. Department of Special Education, University of Ankara (TR), Ankara, Turkey

    Tevhide Kargin & Birkan Guldenoglu

  3. Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Haifa, 31905, Israel

    Paul Miller

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Table 3 Examples of test sentences
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Miller, P., Kargin, T. & Guldenoglu, B. The Reading Comprehension Failure of Turkish Prelingually Deaf Readers: Evidence from Semantic and Syntactic Processing. J Dev Phys Disabil 25, 221–239 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10882-012-9299-8

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