Orthographic learning in children who are deaf or hard of hearing

Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to
investigate the relationship between orthographic learning
and language, reading, and cognitive skills in 9-year-old
children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) and to
compare their performance to age-matched typically
hearing (TH) controls.

Method: Eighteen children diagnosed with moderate-to-
profound hearing loss who use hearing aids and/or cochlear
implants participated. Their performance was compared with
35 age-matched controls with typical hearing. Orthographic
learning was evaluated using a spelling task and a recognition
task. The children were assessed on measures of reading
ability, language, working memory, and paired-associate
learning.

Results: On average, the DHH group performed more poorly
than the TH controls on the spelling measure of orthographic
learning, but not on the recognition measure. For both
groups of children, there were significant correlations
between orthographic learning and phonological decoding
and between visual–verbal paired-associate learning and
orthographic learning.

Conclusions: Although the children who are DHH had lower
scores in the spelling test of orthographic learning than their
TH peers, measures of their reading ability revealed that
they acquired orthographic representations successfully. The
results are consistent with the self-teaching hypothesis in
suggesting that phonological decoding is important for
orthographic learning.

Copyright © 2019 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association