Assessing the contribution of lexical quality variables to skilled reading in profoundly deaf adults

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Low literacy levels are a significant societal concern because poor reading ability is associated with many negative outcomes, including poor academic and employment opportunities, limited access to public information, and reduced civic engagement. Although deficits in spoken language phonology are characteristic of both deaf and hearing people with reading difficulties, whether phonological knowledge is critical to reading success for deaf individuals is currently not known and under debate. Crucially, it is also unknown how deaf readers compensate for reduced phonological abilities or whether hearing and deaf adults with low literacy skills exhibit similar reading patterns. This project targets both highly skilled deaf and hearing readers, as well as those with low literacy skills, in order to tease apart reading patterns that reflect general effects of poor reading ability (across both deaf and hearing populations) from those that are specific only to deaf readers. By studying reading processes in profoundly deaf people, this project will provide novel insight into how the reading system adapts to different types of experiences (e.g., reduced access to sound, changes in visual attention due to deafness). This project draws on the "triangle model" of reading and the Lexical Quality Hypothesis to examine how distinct experience with and knowledge of the phonological, orthographic, and semantic properties of words (i.e., lexical quality variables) impact reading processes for deaf and hearing adults. The project utilizes a deaf-appropriate assessment battery (measuring reading skill and lexical quality variables), hierarchical regression modeling, psycholinguistic paradigms (e.g., transposed letter manipulations; semantic categorization), and eye tracking methods to characterize word- and sentence-level reading processes for deaf and hearing adults who are matched on reading ability. In addition, this project tests the Word Processing Efficiency hypothesis, which proposes that deaf readers are "more efficient" than hearing readers at processing words (and upcoming words) when reading sentences because they can grasp more information in parafoveal vision (outside of where your eyes are fixating); these differences arise because deafness enhances attention to the periphery of vision. Overall, this project is designed to provide a better understanding of the flexibility of the reading system which will help to optimize literacy education for deaf and hearing students. Finally, the principal investigator is committed to improving opportunities for deaf students by providing a research environment that is accessible to them and training that facilitates entrance into STEM fields.