Reading Difficulty Characteristics in Dyslexic and Hearing-impaired Students

Abstract

This study examines reading difficulty characteristics in Hebrew in three reading-impaired populations. Two are groups of dyslexics: 100 readers with impaired auditory perception and 100 readers with impaired visual perception. The third group comprises 61 readers with deep/severe hearing impairment. All were elementary schools students in the second to sixth grades. The subjects were tested with a conventional Hebrew reading test. It examined types of reading errors (e.g. changes of phonetic structure or word content), self-correction in reading, reading speed, sequential/holistic reading, the effect of reading texts with and without the Hebrew diacritical vowel signs ('punctuation'), and the effect of meaningful or meaningless text material on the amount of reading errors. The literature describes distinctions between various kinds of reading disability related to auditory impairment and visual perception, and the definition of dyslexia as being one category or including sub-groups. Our research hypothesis was that similar characteristics of reading difficulties would be found amongst auditory perception-impaired students and hearing-impaired students, and that they would differ from those of students with impaired visual perception. Our findings support this hypothesis. Many of the sub-tests revealed similarity in the reading difficulties between the hearing impaired students and those with impaired auditory perception versus the visually impaired. An unexpected finding revealed that fourth grade students in all the groups were a special sub-group in each group. These findings suggest, in accordance with a major research approach, that dyslexia should be defined in terms of dyslexia sub-groups rather than as a single category.