ABSTRACT
The intent of this chapter is to examine bases of reading ability in signing deaf children. If learning to read is viewed as the task of learning the relation between spoken language and its representation in print (Adams, 1990; Liberman, Shankweiler, Liberman, Fowler, & Fischer, 1977), then the task of learning to read in the case of signing deaf children must be doubly complicated. First, of course, is their lack of direct access to spoken language. They do not hear, and presumably do not use, at least not efficiently, sounding out processes that might help them learn to read. Second, the form and structure of the signed language they use is unrelated to either spoken English or its written form. If signed language competence has a relation with reading, it is not obvious why it should. Indeed, most of the literature on reading development and achievement in deaf children does not include deaf children’s signed language competence as a variable (e.g., Conrad, 1979; Campbell, 1992; Hayes & Arnold, 1992; Holt, 1994). Recently, there have been suggestions that American Sign Language (ASL) skills might play a role in reading (Kuntze, 1994; Paul, Bernhardt & Gramly, 1992), in part because of studies showing that deaf children with deaf parents perform well on reading achievement tests when compared to deaf children of different backgrounds (Mayberry, 1989; Moores & Sweet, 1990; Prinz & Strong, 1998; Singleton et al., 1998). One could argue, however, that the relation between signed language and reading is simply fortuitous. A child’s skill in ASL provides a linguistic foundation from which development of another language skill such as reading can take place. Possibly also, experience with ASL forms a symbolic base from which children can learn meaning of words in print. This is essentially the claim that Paul et al. (1992) made: Children who comprehend written text and the message of the text are better equipped to carry out the decoding that is basic to reading ability. Paul et al. also referred to the influence of a community of deaf adults who read as enabling deaf children to imagine themselves as readers. These are important, even essential, elements to reading development, but the question of whether ASL specifically is implicated in reading and writing ability has yet to be addressed.
