Orthographic learning in children with hearing impairment

• Early in reading development, children generally read by using phonological decoding strategies where words are read letter by letter. Later in reading development, orthographic decoding strategies are generally used by most readers. This means that whole words are recognized directly through a process of comparing written words to mental orthographic representations, i.e. long-term memories of written words.This strategy is quicker and more efficient for reading familiar words.The process of building up a mental orthographic lexicon in long term memory is often referred to as orthographic learning (e.g. Share, 2004). In children with normal hearing and typical development, those who are better at phonological decoding also become better at constructing their orthographic lexicon. Children with cochlear implants (CI) have demonstrated relatively high reading skills despite less favorable cognitive prerequisites in terms of phonological representations, phonological working memory, phonological skills and lexical access (Asker-Árnason et al., 2007, Wass et al., 2010).The present study explores the acquistion orthographic representations in children who use CI and children who have moderate hearing impairments and use hearing aids (HA). The performance of each group was compared to that of hearing children matched for grade, nonverbal intelligence and gender.The results indicated that the children with CI did not have significantly different orthographic learning ability than their comparison group but had slightly poorer reading comprehension. The children with HA performed significantly poorer than their comparison group on orthographic learning but had similar reading skills as their comparison group on all measures of reading.

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