Learning How to Read and Bypassing Sound

Supalla & Blackburn (2003)

For signing deaf students, we encounter a unique linguistic situation. American Sign Language and English are not simply two languages. They are languages that rely on separate modalities, one in hearing and other in sight (Singleton, Supalla, Litchfield, & Schley, 1998). In this sense hearing students enjoy at least two advantages compared to deaf students in learning how to read. For hearing students, the text is consistent with the way they speak. Further, they can use a system of phonetic skills to decode individual words and discover their meanings. Deaf students on the other hand, are confronted with sentences that are constructed differently from what they sign. There is a gap between the deaf student's knowledge -- his or her competency in American Sign Language -- and how print represents English, a language that he or she cannot hear.