Comprehension of Story Reading by Hearing Impaired Children using Miscue Analysis

Abstract

The reading of hearing impaired children has been neither adequately evaluated nor fully understood although it is commonly accepted that hearing impaired children seldom achieve reading proficiency above a fourth grade reading level. However, little is known of the strategies used by hearing impaired children who have been trained orally and the degree of proficiency they might exhibit when given whole stories to read independently. This study examines selected processes and comprehension of whole story reading by orally trained children with hearing impairment in comparison with normal hearing children. Subjects were 35 hearing impaired children in grades four, six and eight and 20 hearing children in grades four and six. Groups were matched on the basis of IQ standard deviations (40-70). Comprehension of the total story was evaluated by miscue analysis. Retelling suggests that comprehension is positively correlated with the qualities of miscues while the frequency of miscues disturbs the level of comprehension in oral story reading. Further, in word processing, hearing impaired children use both graphic symbols and grammatical structure, but sound cues are inadequately used in comparison with hearing children. In addition, in sentence processing, while hearing impaired children make relatively inadequate use of syntactic cues, use of semantic cues is appropriate. Further, no significant difference exists between hearing impaired and normal hearing children in processing of context and rate of story retelling, but differences in comprehension where hearing impaired children were developmentally delayed in processing of story plot and theme were observed. These findings suggest that while orally-trained hearing impaired children show minor delay in some areas of processing written material, they do comprehend stories by using multiple omission miscues. That is, they engage in more guessing during the reading process than do normal hearing children.