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Deaf readers' comprehension of relative clause structures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Diane C. Lillo-Martin ,
Vicki L. Hanson  and
Suzanne T. Smith
Diane C. Lillo-Martin*
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut and Haskins Laboratories
Vicki L. Hanson
Affiliation:
IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center
Suzanne T. Smith
Affiliation:
Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School
*
Diane Lillo-Martin, University of Connecticut, Department of Linguistics, U-145, 341 Mansfield Rd., Rm. 230, Storrs, CT 06269-1 145
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Abstract

It is commonly found that most deaf readers display an overall depressed level of reading performance in conjunction with specific difficulties in complex syntax. In this study, deaf good and poor readers' comprehension of relative clause structures was tested in written English, signed English, and American Sign Language. It was found that the behavior of deaf good and poor readers was parallel across relative clause sentence types, and that the deaf readers generally performed similarly to hearing readers tested in a different study. These results support the hypothesis that a specific syntactic disability does not differentiate deaf good and poor readers. Instead, it is suggested that a processing deficit may underlie the poor readers' comprehension difficulties.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , January 1992 , pp. 13 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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