Silent reading: Insights from second-generation deaf readers

Previous studies indicate that hearing readers sometimes convert printed text into a phonological form during silent reading. The experiments reported here investigated whether second-generation congenitally deaf readers use any analogous recoding strategy. Fourteen congenitally and profoundly deaf adults who were native signers of American Sign Language (ASL) served as subjects. Fourteen hearing people of comparable reading levels were control subjects. These subjects participated in four experiments that tested for the possibilities of (a) recoding into articulation, (b) recoding into fingerspelling, (c) recoding into ASL, or (d) no recoding at all. The experiments employed paradigms analogous to those previously used to test for phonological recoding in hearing populations. Interviews with the deaf subjects provided supplementary information about their reading strategies. The results suggest that these deaf subjects as a group do not recode into articulation or fingerspelling, but do recode into sign.