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.

Figure 1

An example of the trajectory of the eyes and the related events in the invisible boundary paradigm^a. ^aThe stars represent the location of the eye fixations and the dashed lines represent the saccades. The vertical lines indicate the location of the invisible boundary and are not seen by the participants. In line a, the word large (word₄) is fixated and the word mail (word₅) begins to be processed in parafoveal vision. During the saccade from word₄ (large) to word₅ (mail), the eyes cross the boundary and trigger the display change so that the preview word mail (line a) is replaced by the target word male (line b). When the eyes land on word₅ (male), the preview word (mail) is already changed for the target word (male). After the target word has been fixated, reading continues normally (line c).