Writing composition ability and spelling competence in deaf subjects: a psycholinguistic analysis of source of difficulties

Abstract We studied the compositional written skills and spelling competence of individuals with a severe hearing impairment, examining qualitative quantitative characteristics their texts, psycholinguistic variables modulating productions, writing errors following fine-grained analysis. Sixteen deaf young adults, educated in bilingual settings, were examined compared to group control subjects matched for gender, age, education. Writing through both composition picture-naming tasks. Concerning skills, participants produced shorter less informative fewer adjectives subordinates, qualitatively worse respect texts by controls. Words those acquired earlier facilitated higher lexical neighbourhood. Errors mainly semantic, morphological, syntactic errors, reflecting general linguistic weakness. Spelling few, phonologically nonplausible misspellings relative controls, plausible ones being quite rare. In task, people had greater number all types text, including semantic morphological errors. Their performance featured misspellings, while relatively few comparable Overall, adults reveal limitations grammar lexical-sematic competence. This was associated deficits characterized poorer use phonological sublexical procedures. However, an ecologic context, appear not so important as has been claimed literature.