Relationships of English grammar and communicative fluency to reading in deaf adolescents

Abstract

Abstract We studied two groups of congenitally deaf students 16 to 18 years of age: one group consisted of deaf children of deaf parents and the second group consisted of deaf children of hearing parents. There were 65 subjects in each group. We studied the relationships of the dependent variable of reading with three measures of communicative fluency and two measures of English grammar/structure. For both groups there were high correlations between reading and the two measures of English grammar/structure; the Test of Syntactic Abilities and the Signed English Morphology Tests. Correlations ranged from .55 to .70, indicating that both tests are high predictive of reading for deaf adolescents. Moderate (.30 and .42), although statistically significant, correlations were found between reading and oral and manual language proficiency interviews for both groups. Fluency in American Sign Language (ASL), as measured by an ASL language proficiency interview, was not correlated with reading for either group. The reading/ASL correlation was .06 for deaf children of deaf parents and .04 for deaf children of hearing parents.