How do Profoundly Deaf Children Learn to Read?

Reading requires two related, but separable, capabilities: (1) familiarity with a language, and (2) understanding the mapping between that language and the printed word (Chamberlain & Mayberry, 2000; Hoover & Gough, 1990). Children who are profoundly deaf are disadvantaged on both counts. Not surprisingly, then, reading is difficult for profoundly deaf children. But some deaf children do manage to read fluently. How? Are they simply the smartest of the crop, or do they have some strategy, or circumstance, that facilitates linking the written code with language? A priori one might guess that knowing American Sign Language (ASL) would interfere with learning to read English simply because ASL does not map in any systematic way onto English. However, recent research has suggested that individuals with good signing skills are not worse, and may even be better, readers than individuals with poor signing skills (Chamberlain & Mayberry, 2000). Thus, knowing a language (even if it is not the language captured in print) appears to facilitate learning to read. Nonetheless, skill in signing does not guarantee skill in reading—reading must be taught. The next frontier for reading research in deaf education is to understand how deaf readers map their knowledge of sign language onto print, and how instruction can best be used to turn signers into readers. Most profoundly deaf children read poorly. However, a small minority learn to read fluently. Understanding how profoundly deaf children learn, or fail to learn, ∗ Preparation of this paper was supported by grant RO1 DC00491 from NIH to S. Goldin-Meadow, and by grant 171239 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and grant 410-98-0803 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to R. Mayberry. Requests for reprints should be sent to Susan Goldin-Meadow, University of Chicago, 5730 South Woodlawn Ave., Chicago, IL 60637. to read is important for at least two reasons. First, the more we understand the process by which deaf children read, the more we can do to improve that process in the deaf population. Second, understanding reading in deaf children has the potential to inform us about reading in all populations. WHY MIGHT DEAF CHILDREN BE DISADVANTAGED WHEN LEARNING TO READ? Virtually all children learn to speak effortlessly. Yet not all learn to read and reading is often difficult. Why? To become readers, children must learn the mapping between the spoken language they already know and printed words on a page. For English, as for most languages, that mapping is based on sound. Once children understand the underlying principles of the print-sound mapping—once they “crack the code”—they can call upon their knowledge of their spoken language to facilitate the reading process. Profoundly deaf children are disadvantaged as potential readers on both of these counts—they do not have easy access to the phonological code and many do not know any language well, let alone the language captured in print. Reduced Access to the Phonological Code Profoundly deaf children have inadequate access to the auditory basis for print-sound mapping. Roughly one in 1,000 children born in the United States is severely to profoundly deaf (Ruben, 1972). A child with a severe (70 to 89 decibel) hearing loss is unable to hear even shouted conversation and thus cannot learn speech as a normally hearing child would. A child with a profound (≥90 decibel) loss hears only occasional loud sounds and these sounds may be perceived as vibrations rather than sound patterns. GOLDIN-MEADOW AND MAYBERRY: DEAF CHILDREN LEARNING TO READ 223 A deaf child’s limited hearing abilities can be augmented with hearing aids, and amplification via a hearing aid does increase a child’s awareness of sound. However, the extent to which a hearing aid can help the child learn a spoken language depends on many factors, including which speech frequencies the child is able to hear with the hearing aid and the extent to which speech sounds remain distorted despite amplification (Moores, 1982; Seyfried & Kricos, 1989). The cochlear implant is a relatively new device designed to improve upon the hearing aid. Unlike a hearing aid, which is removable, the cochlear implant is surgically placed inside the portion of the inner ear that converts sound to neural signals (the cochlea). The implant receives signals from an external device worn behind the ear and stimulates electrodes in the cochlea; the electrodes stimulate the auditory nerve directly, bypassing the hair cells that implement the first stage of auditory neural processing in intact ears. Cochlear implants appear to improve hearing for adults who become deaf after having a spoken language. However, the data are much less clear for prelingually deaf children who must learn spoken language through the device (Owens & Kessler, 1989; Svirsky, Robbins, Kirk, Pisoni, & Miyamoto, 2000). It is hardly surprising, then, that children born with severe to profound hearing losses often do not achieve the kind of proficiency in spoken language that normally hearing children do. Even with intensive oral instruction, deaf children’s acquisition of speech is markedly delayed when compared to the acquisition of speech by normally hearing children of hearing parents (Conrad, 1979; Mayberry, In press; Meadow, 1968; Seyfried & Kricos, 1989). The bottom line for profoundly deaf children is that they do not have access to the same auditory base that normally hearing children do. Reduced Access to the Language Captured in Print Profoundly deaf children typically have imperfect knowledge of the language that is mapped by the print system they are learning—English, for children learning to read in the United States. Perhaps surprisingly, the language a deaf child typically learns differs for children born to deaf vs. hearing parents. Deaf Children Born to Deaf Parents Speech is not the only route to language. Language can be learned through the eye and hand rather than the ear and mouth, that is, children can learn a signed rather than a spoken language. Deaf children born to deaf parents are very likely to be exposed to a natural sign language such as ASL from birth. These children learn ASL as their first language. They learn ASL easily, as easily as hearing children learn English (Lillo-Martin, 1999; Newport & Meier, 1985). Unfortunately for the potential deaf reader, ASL is not English. Sign languages are autonomous languages, not based on the spoken languages of hearing cultures (Bellugi & Studdert-Kennedy, 1980; Emmorey, In press; Klima & Bellugi, 1979; Lane & Grosjean, 1980). The structure of ASL is distinct from the structure of English. Indeed, the structure of ASL is distinct even from the structure of British Sign Language—a fact that dramatically underscores the point that sign languages are not derivative from spoken languages. Indeed, ASL is closer in structure to polysynthetic languages such as Navajo than to English (Newport & Meier, 1985). The bottom line for many deaf children born to deaf parents is that, although they are native (and fluent) users of a language (sign language), that language is not the language they are learning to read. Deaf Children Born to Hearing Parents Ninety percent of deaf children in the United States are born to hearing parents, who are not likely to know sign language. As a result, these deaf children will not be exposed to sign language at birth. Before 1960, the only educational option available to young deaf children in the classroom was oral instruction without sign language. It was not until 1960, when Stokoe published the first linguistic analysis of ASL, that educators began to realize that the manual modality could support language. Although ASL was slowly earning recognition as a “real” language, the prevailing belief among teachers of the deaf was that learning to sign English ought to be better for learning to read English than learning to sign ASL. As a result, educators, both deaf and hearing, invented a number of different sign systems (Signing Essential English, Seeing Essential English, Signing Exact English, Signed English; Lou, 1988) which, as a group, are referred to as Manually Coded English (MCE).1 All these systems are synthesized—they borrow signs from ASL and syntactic structure from English. The goal is for children to learn the structure of English, not only through the sound and lip-reading patterns of spoken English, but also through the manual patterns of signed English. To foster the development of speech and spoken English, MCE is signed while simultaneously speaking English. Although perhaps an excellent idea in principle, MCE systems are difficult to process in practice. Teachers of the deaf find it hard to sign and speak at the same 1 The most current, although at the moment still rare, movement in deaf education recognizes that knowing one language (ASL) makes it easier to learn another (English). Under this model, the goal of the deaf school is to promote and, when necessary, teach ASL as deaf children’s first language, and then teach English (either through print, sign, or sound) as their second—in other words, to foster bilingual deaf education (Singleton, Supalla, Litchfield, & Schley,