What Eye Movements Reveal about Deaf Readers

Abstract

Levels of illiteracy in the deaf populations around the world have been extremely high for decades and much higher than the illiteracy levels found in the general population. Research has mostly focused on deaf readers' difficulties rather than on their strengths, which can then inform reading education. Deaf readers are a unique population. They process language and the world surrounding them mostly via the visual channel and this greatly affects how they read or might learn to read. The study of eye movements in reading provides highly sophisticated information about how words and sentences are processed and our research with deaf readers reveals the importance of their uniqueness.

Keywords: Deaf readers; eye movements; perceptual span; reading skill; word processing.

Figure 1

a) Example of a moving window on three consecutive fixations. The asterisks represent the position of the eye. In this example, the window is asymmetrical and shows 4 letter spaces (including the space between words) to the left and 10 letter spaces to the right of fixation. b) Reading rate (words per minute) as a function of window size (WS) for the skilled hearing readers (SKH), skilled deaf readers (SKD) and less-skilled deaf readers (LSKD).

Figure 2

a) An example of the trajectory of the eyes and the related events in the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975).^a b) Percentage of orthographic (letters) and phonological (phonemes) overlap between primes and targets across conditions. ^aThe asterisks represent the location of the eye fixations and the dashed lines represent the saccades. The vertical lines indicate the location of an invisible boundary, which is not seen by the participants, but serve as the trigger for the display change. In line a, the word feeling (word₃) is fixated and the word week (word₄) begins to be processed in parafoveal vision. During the saccade from word₃ (feeling) to word₄ (week), the eyes cross the invisible boundary and trigger a display change so that the preview word week (line a) is replaced by the correct target word weak (line b). When the eyes land on word₄ (weak), the preview word (week) is already changed for the target word (weak). After the target word has been fixated, reading continues normally (line c).