ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the role of feedback mechanisms and rehearsal systems in reading and writing. In the diagnostic reading battery, the child was given several series of sentences, carefully graded according to grammar and meaning, and asked to select a target sentence to go with a picture. The child's social experience and mastery of language, style of learning, more general cognitive development and control of reflective thinking, are all implicated. The chapter looks at what the deaf child brings to reading. A group of children suffering mild hearing losses from an early age is likely to show marked delays in mastery of speech sounds, with confusions in the perception of speech and in production of sound contrasts. One commonly held belief is that the more severely hearing-impaired the child, the more that vision will be relied upon as the primary communication channel.
