| The goal of the current study was to describe the spelling skills of deaf children with cochlear implants as compared to hearing peers. No studies to date have quantitatively investigated spelling in this population. The study of children's spellings offers a unique opportunity to observe children's understanding of how sounds are represented by letters, which is an important skill for overall literacy success. Previous studies of deaf children without cochlear implants have suggested that, although these children are somewhat sensitive to sound-spelling relationships, the majority of their errors reflect a rote memorization strategy. The current study found that deaf children with implants use phonological information in spelling, with little evidence for rote memorization of letter sequences relative to hearing children. Implanted children are better at spelling words with typical sound---spelling correspondences than atypically spelled words and make sound-based mistakes on consonant clusters. Implanted children do not make proportionally more rote memorization errors, as measured by how often they transpose letters within words, than hearing peers. However, deaf children with implants do not employ a phonological strategy to the same degree as hearing children: Hearing children are more sensitive to typicality than deaf children, and are more likely to make sound-based errors. This study examined factors that influence whether a child spells a word correctly or makes a plausible misspelling. Better readers are better spellers and more likely to make phonological errors than poorer readers. Older children are more accurate spellers than younger children. Linguistic characteristics, such as length, frequency, number of morphemes, pronunciation, word knowledge, and typicality, were all predictors of accuracy. Length, pronunciation, and typicality were also factors in whether a child made sound-based errors. Age at implant was examined for possible effects on accuracy, plausibility of errors, pronunciation, and reading in deaf children. No significant correlations were found after controlling for age. In summary, this study was the first to describe spelling skills in deaf children with cochlear implants using quantitative measures. Deaf children with implants show use of phonology in spelling and little evidence for rote memorization of letter sequences as compared to hearing peers. |
