Phonological Processing Skills and the Development of Reading in Deaf Children Who Use Cochlear Implants

The acquisition of reading and literacy skills in normal-hearing children has been found to be closely related to the development of phonological knowledge and the use of phonological processing skills. Phonological processing is often measured using a nonword repetition task in which a child relies on phonological knowledge and abstract phonological representations in order to decompose, encode, rehearse in working memory, and reproduce novel phonological patterns. In the present study of deaf children with cochlear implants, we found that nonword repetition performance was strongly correlated with several measures of reading skills and a measure of lexical diversity obtained from samples of spontaneous speech. These findings suggest that the phonological knowledge used in nonword repetition may be an important contributor to the acquisition of reading and literacy skills in this clinical population.