Resumen de Reading in students with deafness: an eye-movement research
This thesis focused on describing the online reading pattern of deaf and hard of hearing students (DHH) and the factors that affect it. Previous studies have widely reported and described the difficulties that students with DHH demonstrate during reading. However, there are still some questions in which results do not converge (e.g., Do students with DHH ignore grammatical cues during sentence reading? Do they adapt their reading according to text demands?). Therefore, these questions remain open to new procedures that can disentangle or at least contribute to the understanding of DHH students' reading problems. So far, the vast majority of the studies have approached this issue by measuring students' performance (accuracy) on several linguistic or reading-related tasks. Our general goal was to fill in this gap in the literature by exploring DHH students' reading problems with a focus on the reading process and to reveal reading patterns that are typical for DHH and atypical when compared to students with typical hearing (TH). With that aim, twenty students with DHH (aged 9-15) and 20 chronologically age-matched TH students participated in a series of experimental tasks in which their grammatical comprehension abilities at the single sentence level (Study 1 and Study 2) and their reading comprehension skills at the text level (Study 3) were assessed. Both, offline accuracy measures and online (eye movements) measures were obtained in the three studies.
Study 1 showed that students with DHH were less accurate than students with TH when detecting grammatical incongruences in simple sentences. Although both groups were sensitive to grammatical incongruences (more time and more fixations at the target in incongruent than congruent sentences), students with DHH made more but shorter fixations in the target area than their TH peers. Study 2 showed that students with DHH were leveled to students with TH when reading active sentences but underperformed them on complex sentences. In addition, results confirmed that students with DHH were sensitive to syntactic cues when comprehending sentences, although they made longer and more fixations in lexical distractors than students with TH. Finally, Study 3 revealed that students with TH outperformed DHH in the comprehension of a narrative text but obtained similar results in the expository one. In addition, participants with DHH showed a larger saccade amplitude in the expository than in the narrative text which was interpreted as a deficit in monitoring text difficulty. Finally, Study 3 showed that students with DHH fixated longer content words than students with TH, there were no group differences for function words across texts, these results seem to support a preference for using content words to comprehend a text in students with DHH. Implications of these findings are discussed in the final chapter of the Thesis.
