Morphological Knowledge and Decoding Skills of Deaf Readers

Many studies have reported the necessity of phonological awareness to become a skilled reader, citing barriers to phonological information as the cause for reading difficulties experienced by deaf individuals. In contrast, other research suggests that phonological awareness is not necessary for reading acquisition, citing the importance of higher levels of syntactic and semantic knowledge. To determine if deaf students with higher language skills have better word decoding strategies, students responded to a morphological test, where monomorphemic words and multimorphemic words were matched to their definitions. Two studies are reported, one focusing on English placement levels and a second with formal measures of both ASL and English language proficiency. Results indicated that performance on the morphological decoding test was related to language proficiency scores, but not to phonological awareness scores.