READING MECHANISMS USED BY DEAF ADULT PEOPLE CONSIDERED GOOD READERS

Abstract

The aim of this paper work was to evaluate the level of reading ability reached by deaf adults who were considered readers, and to determine which mechanisms they used. The participants were 14 deaf adults who were attending postcompensatory education and read books and newspapers daily for pleasure and information, and a control group of hearing students from 2nd to 6th grade of Primary School. The results showed that the deaf people obtained a level of reading that corresponded to the last years of Primary School, and they used fundamentally semantic strategies in reading which consists of identifying some of the words of the sentence, the key words, and derive a global representation of its meaning. They used orthographic strategies to identify the key words of a sentence.