Spelling of Deaf Children Who Use Cochlear Implants

Abstract

The spellings of 39 profoundly deaf users of cochlear implants, aged 6 to 12 years, were compared with those of 39 hearing peers. When controlled for age and reading ability, the error rates of the 2 groups were not significantly different. Both groups evinced phonological spelling strategies, performing better on words with more typical sound–spelling correspondences and often making misspellings that were phonologically plausible. However, the magnitude of these phonological effects was smaller for the deaf children than for hearing children of comparable reading and spelling ability. Deaf children with cochlear implants made the same low proportion of transposition errors as hearing children. The findings indicate that deaf children do not rely primarily on visual memorization strategies, as suggested by previous studies. However, deaf children with cochlear implants use phonological spelling strategies to a lesser degree than hearing peers.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Some of these results were presented in the first author's doctoral dissertation and at the meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, Asheville, North Carolina, July 2008. This work was supported in part by grants from the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation. We thank Rochelle Evans for help with data collection, and we are grateful to the parents and children who participated.

Notes

¹Cued speech is a communication method whereby a person uses spoken language while making hand gestures near the face to disambiguate certain phonemes that are difficult to lip read.