Individual Differences in Literacy Skills Among Deaf Readers

A complete theory of literacy in deaf readers should account for individual differences. Such theories should explain how domain general cognitive skills, (e.g., working memory, executive control) and domain specific skills (e.g., orthographic and phonological processing, lexical knowledge, syntactic knowledge), interact with experience (e.g., first-language experience, 2nd language teaching methods, reading habits) to produce literacy outcomes. Recent advances in statistical modeling have provided us with the tools to evaluate such theories. This talk presents results from a large scale study of individual differences among deaf and hearing bilingual readers. The results to date highlight the importance of first language experience as a critical factor in second-language literacy.