Processing of Sight Word Reading in Adult Deaf Individuals

Abstract

To read individual words accurately and quickly is the skilled reader ability. All words that readers can retrieve from their memory quickly are known as sight words including high frequency words. Sight word reading is an automatic process which is not influenced by intention or choice. English alphabetic system is very variable hence open to decoding errors. This makes reading words from memory by sight essential and significant in English. Growing evidence suggests that the deaf children and adults has problem in writing and reading skills. They do more spelling errors than a healthy counterpart. It is also reported that they have good visual processing skills as they collect more informational cues from visual modality hence this will be interesting to explore sight word reading skills in deaf individuals. Hence our aim of the study was to explore the processing rate of sight words in adult deaf individuals, respectively. A total of thirty deaf adults and thirty normal hearing adults participated in the present study. All participants were within age range of 18–30 years with mean age range of 22 years. All participants have English as second language. Sixty words were used among which 20 were sight words taken from Dolch Word List, 20 were nonsight words and 20 being nonwords where the phonotactic rules have been used to make monosyllabic and bisyllabic words, respectively. The words were presented through DMDX automode software, respectively through visual mode. Results suggested that the sight word reading was better for normals than the deaf individuals since the reaction time was better for normals. When compared amongst words then the sight words and nonsight words were recognized faster by the deaf individuals than for the nonwords. Several errors were seen when nonwords were told to be recognized by deaf individuals than for normal individuals (P <0.05).

Keywords: sight word, DMDX, nonword, phonotactics, deaf

Cite this Article

Verma H, Balaji J, Saha A, et al. Processing of Sight Word Reading in Adult Deaf Individuals. Research & Reviews: A Journal of Health Professions. 2018; 8(2): 57–61p.