The Reading Comprehension Failure of Turkish Prelingually Deaf Readers: Evidence from Semantic and Syntactic Processing

This study aimed to determine the factors underlying the reading comprehension (RC) failure of prelingually deaf Turkish readers. Participants were 77 individuals with prelingual deafness and a hearing control of 78 normally developing hearing individuals selected from three distinct levels of education (3rd–4th graders = elementary; 6th–7th graders = middle; 9th–10th graders = high). We applied an experimental paradigm manipulating the semantic plausibility and syntactic complexity of sentences to compare RC at the sentence level. In line with findings reported for prelingually deaf individuals reading in other orthographies, the deaf participants tested in the present study manifested rather alarmingly impoverished RC skills in comparison to their hearing counterparts. The findings suggest that this reading failure is rooted in an apparent deficiency in the ability to recruit syntactic and prior knowledge to make sense of what they read. The evidence further suggests that such deficits prove strikingly resistant to years of formal oral education.