Deafness, spelling and rhyme: How spelling supports written word and picture rhyming skills in deaf subjects

Orally trained, congenitally deaf adolescents and hearing, reading-age-matched control subjects made rhyme judgements for pictures and for written words. Hearing children performed the task accurately. By contrast, the deaf group were very poor at rhyme judgement for words and for pictures. For hearing children, word rhyme judgement was more accurate when the words were congruent in their spelling pattern (e.g. bat/hat), less accurate when the spelling pattern of the rhyming words was incongruent (hair/bear). Deaf subjects showed an even more pronounced effect of spelling congruence; their ability to match for rhyme when written words did not share the same spelling pattern was extremely poor. Moreover, spelling congruence predicted deaf subjects' picture rhyming skills.

We conclude that oral training for deaf people does not always permit them to achieve a reliable phonological representation of speech from lip-reading and residual hearing alone. Instead they use the written spelling of the word. This result is not predicted from some previous results that suggest that orally trained deaf people can make direct, spontaneous use of rhyme in the processing of visually presented material.