Contributions of Rapid Automatized Naming Speed and Phonological Awareness and Decoding

Deaf readers often fail to achieve age-appropriate reading lev-els. In hearing children, two cognitive factors correlated with reading delay are phonological awareness and decoding (PAD) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) of visual material. In this study we explored the contribution of these factors to reading and reading delay in a sample of deaf students (N = 49, mean age 13 years) whose reading age (RA) was around 7 years. Although PAD performance was poor in the deaf stu-dents compared with RA-matched hearing controls, it never-theless correlated with their RA. Whether tested in sign or speech, RAN was much faster in the deaf group than in RA-matched hearing controls but showed no direct relationship with reading level or reading delay. We conclude that in con-trast to PAD, which is a factor in both deaf and hearing read-ing achievement, RAN may be only indirectly related to read-ing in deaf students. In most deaf people, reading and writing skills fail to achieve levels appropriate to the age and intelligence of the student, typically lagging their peers by several years in the final years of obligatory schooling (Conrad, 1979 for British children; Holt, Traxler, & Allen, 1997 for one typical U.S. study; review by Marschark & Har-ris, 1995). At least two major stumbling blocks related to language confront the deaf child on the rocky road t