ABSTRACT
This chapter considers why children with a severe or profound prelingual hearing loss experience great difficulty in learning to read. U. Frith proposed a three-phase theory of development in which the child uses a different reading strategy in each phase. For normally developing children, learning to read occurs some time after learning to speak. There are many different theories about how children learn to read English—and other orthographically irregular languages—but there is general agreement that several different components are involved. Testing of the deaf children was carried out jointly by a deaf researcher and a hearing researcher. A partial correlation was carried out between the reading gain and auditory organization scores obtained by the hearing children. Attaining a reading age of 7 years requires the acquisition of a substantial lexicon. It seems, however, that deaf readers had acquired such a lexicon without making significant use of grapheme–phoneme translation.
