Analysis of Responses to Lipreading Prompts as a Window to Deaf Students’ Writing Strategies

Abstract

In this article the authors suggest that written responses to a previously administered test, such as the Lipreading Screening Test (LST), can be reanalyzed for evidence of knowledge of the rules of written English. For example, a clinician might be interested in knowing whether a deaf student could use English function words correctly; she could review the responses to an existing test, like the LST, for evidence of a student's ability to use English function words correctly. Written responses that contain many function words and particularly those in which the content words do not match stimulus words are particularly useful in answering such a question, as the student writer must be creating the sentences based on internalized rules of English syntax, and not be simply recording the words in the sentences in the lipreading test. The authors observed that the four writers in our study used function words with a high degree of accuracy, which contrasts with some previously published results. Our writers are all college students and therefore are expected to be able to write adequately at the college level. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)