¿Cómo leen los sordos adultos? La estrategia de palabras clave

The aim of this study is to determine the reading mechanisms used by French or Spanish-speaking deaf adults, who had finished their compulsory studies and were attending or had followed secondary or superior studies. They regularly read newspapers and books for pleasure and information. Our main hypothesis was that they read using a key word strategy. This strategy consists of identifying some of the words of the sentence to be read and deriving the general meaning solely on this basis. The words selected are basically frequent names, adjectives and/or verbs allowing a simple semantic interpretation. The use of this strategy resulted from poor control of morpho-syntactic constraints of the sentences. The results fulfilled all the predictions derived from this hypothesis in both language groups. In addition, the participants were presented with a spelling task in which they had to choose the correct spelling of a word from several homophonic items. The results showed that the deaf participants possessed an orthographic lexicon richer than hearing controls of the same reading level. That deaf readers possess a huge orthographic lexicon is in harmony with the key word strategy, which requires the ability to identify at least some of the main words of the sentence. Finally, most of the deaf participants reached scores slightly under the level of the hearing controls in metaphonological tasks. This showed that they do possess phonological representations of the words they know and that they are able to manipulate them in order to do the metaphonological tasks.