Search Abstracts | Symposia | Slide Sessions | Poster Sessions
Rethinking reading without sound: gaze patterns reveal phonological and orthographic processing in deaf skilled readers
Poster Session B, Friday, September 12, 4:30 - 6:00 pm, Field House
Chiara Luna Rivolta1, Liv Hoversten2, Brendan Costello1,3, Manuel Carreiras1,3,4; 1Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL), 2University of California, Santa Cruz, 3Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science, 4University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)
Reading is a complex process that involves the activation of both orthographic and phonological representations to achieve lexical access and comprehension. Limited access to auditory phonology is considered one of the main causes of the challenges that prelingually deaf readers face when acquiring reading proficiency. In this study, we focus on a group of highly skilled deaf readers to investigate which factors contribute to their achievement. We examine whether, despite the absence of auditory input, these readers still engage in phonological processing; alternatively they might develop a heightened sensitivity to orthographic codes compared to hearing readers. We collected eye-tracking data from 44 prelingually deaf skilled readers of Spanish who have low or no access to auditory phonology. Participants read sentences manipulated with the invisible boundary paradigm: target words were primed in the parafovea (prior to fixation) with either pseudohomophones (e.g., kasa for casa), transposed-letter pseudowords (e.g., mecidina for medicina), their corresponding unrelated replaced-letter pseudowords (e.g., dasa or mevihina), or the same word (e.g., casa or medicina) as a baseline. Participants also performed a separate behavioural task to measure reading comprehension where they read narrative and expository texts and responded to multiple-choice comprehension questions testing both explicit and implicit information. We used linear mixed-effect models to examine the effects of word manipulation in the parafovea and reading comprehension on early measures of reading processing, such as first fixation and gaze duration, separately for the phonological (pseudohomophone) and orthographic (transposed-letter) manipulations. Deaf participants did not exhibit any pseudohomophone effect for either eye-tracking measure, indexed by a lack of significant difference in parafoveal priming between the pseudohomophone and pseudoword conditions. This result is consistent with previous findings showing that deaf readers do not necessarily access phonological codes during single word reading (Costello et al., 2021; Fariña et al., 2017). In contrast, in the orthographic manipulation, we found that transposed-letter words provided parafoveal priming benefits relative to pseudowords, resulting in shorter gaze durations on the target word. This result suggests that deaf skilled readers activate orthographic coding — and specifically, letter position — in a similar way to hearing readers (Belanger et al., 2013). Finally, we found a significant reading comprehension effect in all models, showing that higher comprehension scores were linked with faster reading times independently of the parafoveal manipulation. Results from this study expand the current literature on reading processes in the deaf population, providing evidence for skilled sentence reading in a transparent language like Spanish despite the apparent absence of phonological processing. On the other hand, preserved orthographic processing may be key to understanding alternative strategies that contribute to high reading achievement among prelingually deaf readers.
Topic Areas: Reading, Signed Language and Gesture