Examining phonological awareness in deaf children who are learning to read in a transparent orthography: evidence from Greek*

This paper investigates the development of phonological awareness in Greek deaf children. A battery of phonological awareness tasks that assessed syllable, rhyme and phoneme awareness was administered to one group of deaf preschoolers (n = 13, CA = 5;9), one group of deaf children in primary school (n = 11, CA = 7;8) and two hearing comparison groups. The results showed that deaf preschoolers did not have phonological awareness at any linguistic level. After an average of 21 months of literacy instruction, deaf children had developed syllable awareness