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Abstract
We addressed the question of whether deaf children differ from hearing peers already before learning to read when phonological knowledge is developed implicitly, and whether the gap increases when reading instruction requires exerts explicit knowledge between phonemes and graphemes. We conducted a three-year a longitudinal study of 18 deaf children and 18 hearing children of the same chronological age. Among deaf children, some were exposed at an early or late age to Cued Speech while others were not. Children were tested from Kindergarten to second grade, using implicit and explicit metaphonological tasks, word recognition and word spelling tasks. Through na analysis of deviance inspired by Ramus et al. (2003) run at various time points and for the different tasks, we looked to whether deaf children established on the basis of the scores were included within or deviate from the confidence interval established on the basis of the scores of the hearing children. We found that at kindergarten nearly all deaf children had rhyming scores in an implicit task which did not deviate significantly from the hearing children`s confidence interval. From grade 1 onwards however, the individual scores of deaf children who were exposed late or not at all to CS deviated for all metaphonological, reading and spelling tasks. By contrast, the scores of the early CS-users were within these confidence intervals for all tasks. We concluded that early exposure to CS allows deaf children to develop an implicitly structured phonological knowledge before learning to read. When this knowledge becomes explicit under the pressure of reading instruction, these children become better readers and writers.
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