Inferences skills development in reading comprehension of deaf children.A review of involved variables.

Abstract

The proposal of the current study is to analyze the relations between lexical and syntactic knowledge and the ability of deaf children to draw inferences from text reading. We selected a sample of 15 individuals with bilateral and pre-speech deafness, with losses of 70 dB or more in their better ear and with digital hearing aids and/or cochlear implant. All of them are in different levels of primary school. Each participant was evaluated with several standarized tests: PROLEC-R, PPVT-III and CEG.The findings showed differences in ability to draw inferences from texts. The grammatical comprehension competence is a better predictor of reading comprehension abilities than receptive vocabulary competence, in order to make inferences from written language, especially in expository texts.