Use of Grammatical Constraints in Reading By Young Deaf Adults as Reflected in Eye-Voice Span

This paper reports evidence that profoundly prelingually deaf adults use a chunking strategy during reading to group words in grammatical units that are used as units of processing. Twenty-five deaf and 28 hearing subjects read aloud materials of varying amounts of grammatical constraint. When the subject's voice reached a preselected position in the text, the text was removed from view. The subject continued to report words that he had already seen. The number of correct consecutive words reported after removal of the text was his eye-voice span. Though eye-voice spans of deaf and hearing groups were quantitatively different, they were qualitatively similar - longer at positions of high grammatical constraint and shorter at positions of low grammatical constraint. Eye-voice spans of both groups tended to end at phrase boundaries, more often at positions of high grammatical constraint and less often at positions of low grammatical constraint. Eye-voice span peformance of deaf subjects was consistent with their silent reading comprehension performance, suggesting that they used the same cognitive processes in both oral and silent reading.