Evidence of an association between sign language phonological awareness and word reading in deaf and hard-of-hearing children.
Sign-language phonological awareness predicts word reading in deaf children learning Swedish, so screen it even when the sign language has no written form.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Holmer et al. (2016) tested deaf and hard-of-hearing children in Sweden. They asked: does sign-language phonological awareness link to reading Swedish words? They also checked spoken-language phonological awareness. The kids used Swedish Sign Language even though Swedish has no written sign form.
What they found
Sign-language phonological awareness tied tightly to word reading. Spoken-language phonological awareness did not. The finding held even though Swedish Sign Language has no print version. Knowing hand-shape patterns in signs predicted reading real Swedish words.
How this fits with other research
Cai et al. (2019) conceptually replicated the link in Chinese deaf children. Vocabulary still ruled reading fluency, but phonological awareness mattered less. Hao et al. (2021) extended the question and found visual-orthographic skill, not phonological awareness, drove Chinese reading. Together the three studies show the predictor changes with language: sign-PA helps Swedish, visual-orthographic helps Chinese, vocabulary helps both.
Why it matters
If you serve deaf or hard-of-hearing readers, test sign-language phonological awareness early. Do not assume spoken sound skills must come first. For Swedish or similar alphabetic languages, strong sign-PA is a green light for print instruction. For logographic languages like Chinese, shift your lens to visual-orthographic and vocabulary skills. Match the assessment tool to the language system your client will read.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Children with good phonological awareness (PA) are often good word readers. Here, we asked whether Swedish deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children who are more aware of the phonology of Swedish Sign Language, a language with no orthography, are better at reading words in Swedish. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: We developed the Cross-modal Phonological Awareness Test (C-PhAT) that can be used to assess PA in both Swedish Sign Language (C-PhAT-SSL) and Swedish (C-PhAT-Swed), and investigated how C-PhAT performance was related to word reading as well as linguistic and cognitive skills. We validated C-PhAT-Swed and administered C-PhAT-Swed and C-PhAT-SSL to DHH children who attended Swedish deaf schools with a bilingual curriculum and were at an early stage of reading. OUTCOMES AND RESULTS: C-PhAT-SSL correlated significantly with word reading for DHH children. They performed poorly on C-PhAT-Swed and their scores did not correlate significantly either with C-PhAT-SSL or word reading, although they did correlate significantly with cognitive measures. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: These results provide preliminary evidence that DHH children with good sign language PA are better at reading words and show that measures of spoken language PA in DHH children may be confounded by individual differences in cognitive skills.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2016 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2015.10.008