| For the present dissertation, three studies were conducted to investigate various aspects of reading in severely to profoundly deaf individuals who use Quebec Sign Language as their main mode of communication and who were categorized as skilled or less skilled readers. A group of skilled hearing readers also participated so that their results could be compared to existing literature. Two studies investigated the use of orthographic and phonological codes during early French word processing, with a masked primed lexical decision task (Study 1) and with the observation of eye movements (Study 3). The second study served as a bridge between the first and the third studies. The participants' eye movements were recorded to determine their eye movement characteristics, such as their reading speed and the size of their perceptual and word identification spans.;The results of the first and third studies converged to show that deaf readers, skilled and less skilled, process orthographic (Studies 1 & 3) and phonological (Study 1) codes very early during word processing. Importantly, skilled and less skilled deaf readers did not differ in the way they encode words relative to the control group of hearing readers. The observation of the participants' eye movements in the second study revealed that reading-level, not hearing status (hearing or deaf), was the main factor determining the characteristics of the participants' eye movements (such as reading speed, size of the word identification span, etc). However, hearing status was a determining factor in the size of the perceptual span of skilled deaf readers, which, unexpectedly, was wider than that of skilled hearing readers. An overarching finding in the three studies is that the three participant groups differed mainly in the speed at which they read or recognized words. Skilled deaf readers, even when matched on reading level with skilled hearing readers read more slowly than the latter group. It was concluded that the main difference between the three groups of readers, apart from the size of the perceptual span in the skilled deaf readers, was one of speed of processing which could be related to low general language competence in many deaf readers. |
