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Hearing Impairment and Visual Perceptual Processes in Reading
Author(s) -
COOPER CAROLYN,
ARNOLD PAUL
Publication year - 1981
Publication title -
international journal of language and communication disorders
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.101
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1460-6984
pISSN - 1368-2822
DOI - 10.3109/13682828109011385
Subject(s) - audiology , psychology , reading (process) , perception , sentence , visual perception , test (biology) , developmental psychology , dyslexia , el niño , hearing loss , medicine , linguistics , paleontology , philosophy , neuroscience , biology , surgery
SUMMARY The hypothesis investigated was, that reading retardation in hearing impaired children is due in part to certain visual perceptual deficits known to be related to mechanical reading skills. Nineteen children, from a school for the hearing impaired, with a mean age of 11.23 were found to have a mean reading age of 7.6 on the Sal ford Sentence Reading Test. Nineteen hearing controls were selected with the same mean reading age on the Reading Test but with a mean chronological age of 7.71 years. Five sub‐tests of the Frostig Developmental Test of Visual Perception were administered to all of the children. It was found that the partially hearing school children showed deficits on all the visual sub‐tests of the Frostig Test, compared with the published norms for hearing children of the same age. The partially hearing generally performed at the same level as the hearing controls who were on average 3 1/2 years younger. It is suggested that this deficit in visual perceptual skills contributes to the relatively poor level of reading attained by the partially hearing.