Phonological coding by the prelinguistically deaf

A series of experiments was carried out to determine the type of linguistic input used by profoundly prelinguistically deaf subjects who had acquired a phonological code which enabled them to match homophones and identify rhymes. The results indicated that the tasks were primarily done by using visual information from lipreading, and that the subjects did not rely greatly on similarities of written representation, lexical information, or motor feedback from the articulators to perform the phonological matching tasks.