Reading in students with deafness: An eye-movement research

This thesis focused on describing the online reading pattern of deaf and hard of hearing students (DHH) and the factors that affect it. Previous studies have widely reported and described the difficulties that students with DHH demonstrate during reading. However, there are still some questions in which results do not converge (e.g., Do students with DHH ignore grammatical cues during sentence reading? Do they adapt their reading according to text demands?). Therefore, these questions remain open to new procedures that can disentangle or at least contribute to the understanding of DHH students' reading problems. So far, the vast majority of the studies have approached this issue by measuring students' performance (accuracy) on several linguistic or reading-related tasks. Our general goal was to fill in this gap in the literature by exploring DHH students' reading problems with a focus on the reading process and to reveal reading patterns that are typical for DHH and atypical when compared to students with typical hearing (TH). With that aim, twenty students with DHH (aged 9-15) and 20 chronologically age-matched TH students participated in a series of experimental tasks in which their grammatical comprehension abilities at the single sentence level (Study 1 and Study 2) and their reading comprehension skills at the text level (Study 3) were assessed. Both, offline accuracy measures and online (eye movements) measures were obtained in the three studies. In Study 1, we explored the ability of DHH students to detect grammatical incongruences during sentence reading by means of a grammatical judgment task, eye movements were monitored in the meanwhile. Results from this study showed that students with DHH were less accurate than students with TH when detecting grammatical incongruences in simple sentences. Although both groups were sensitive to grammatical incongruences (more time and more fixations at the target in incongruent than congruent sentences), students with DHH made more but shorter fixations in the target area than their TH peers. In Study 2, we aimed to examine the extent to which DHH students rely on semantic and syntactic cues during sentence interpretation in comparison to their chronological-age typically hearing peers. To do so, we used a sentence-picture-matching task in which students read sentences with different grammatical structures and were asked to depict the correct response between pictures that included syntactic and semantic distractors. Results from this study showed that students with DHH were levelled to students with TH when reading active sentences but underperformed them on complex sentences. In addition, results confirmed that students with DHH were sensitive to syntactic cues when comprehending sentences, although they made longer and more fixations in lexical distractors than students with TH. Finally, in Study 3, we explored how the reading pattern of students with DHH was modulated by factors such as text genre (narrative versus expository) or varied for each grammatical word class (function words versus content words). With regard to the results, students with TH outperformed DHH in the comprehension of a narrative text but obtained similar results in the expository one. In addition, participants with DHH showed a larger saccade amplitude in the expository than in the narrative text which was interpreted as a deficit in monitoring text difficulty. Finally, students with DHH fixated longer content words than students with TH, there were no group differences for function words across texts, these results seem to support a preference for using content words to comprehend a text in students with DHH

Retos de la educación online en estudiantes con sordera

Evaluar mediante un cuestionario las dificultades de escucha que afronta el alumnado universitario con pérdida auditiva cuando recibe clases virtuales. No sólo hablaremos de alumnado con sordera sino también con hipoacusia en los que la percepción del habla, especialmente en entornos ruidosos, se ve afectada. Dentro del Proyecto “Impacto de las mascarillas faciales en la percepción del habla en el aula

READ-COGvid: A Database From Reading and Media Habits During COVID-19 Confinement in Spain and Italy

In the present paper, we present the READ-COGvid database, composed of responses of 4,800 individuals from Spain and Italy. While we focus on leisure and reading habits at different moments (before the confinement, shortly after confinement, and after 1 month confined), we also collected many other indices (socio-demographic, psychological, and reading-related) that may be of interest to researchers interested in adults' reading and related areas (e.g., communication research, cognitive sciences, social studies, health sciences, cross-cultural studies).Psicologí

Reading comprehension: a comparison of typically hearing and deaf or hard-of-hearing children

Much has been written about the components that contribute to reading success, such as vocabulary knowledge, phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, syntax, and inference and integration skills. But much less is known about how these skills contribute to reading comprehension in learners who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH). With the spread of universal hearing screening of newborns, and the new generation of technologies in hearing compensation (i.e., digital hearing aids and cochlear implants [CIs]), the prospects for children with hearing loss with regard to successful reading comprehension should be substantially improved. However, despite these developments, reading and writing often remain a challenge for DHH children. The chapter begins with a summary of the skills required for successful comprehension in typically hearing readers, and then considers what we know about reading comprehension in DHH children. It concludes with a discussion of where researchers should be focusing their future investigations in order to serve educators and learners most effectively

La lectura compartida durante el confinamento por COVID-19

Desde hace años, se han reportado los beneficios que la lectura compartida ejerce para el desarrollo lingüístico y lector de los niños. Debido a la COVID-19, en marzo del 2020, la población española se confinó y tuvo que modificar sus rutinas y actividades a las necesidades del momento, incluidas las académicas. Según Bao et al. (2020), este cambio interferiría en el progreso en lectura para los escolares, y el tiempo de lectura compartida con los padres contribuiría a amortiguar dichos efectos. Nuestro estudio tiene como objetivo explorar los cambios que se produjeron en la lectura compartida durante el confinamiento, así como las variables que influyeron. Para ello se utilizó la base de datos de la encuesta de Salmerón et al. (2020) sobre hábitos lectores de la población española antes y durante el confinamiento, y se analizó la respuesta de 828 padres/madres que realizaban lectura compartida con sus hijos. En cuanto a los resultados se observa que (1) el tiempo dedicado a lectura compartida aumenta a lo largo del confinamiento; (2) antes del confinamiento los padres con hijos en la etapa de Infantil dedicaban más tiempo a la lectura compartida que los padres con niños en Primaria, pero durante el confinamiento estas diferencias desaparecen; (3) la proporción de uso del soporte digital aumentó respecto a la situación previa al confinamiento; (4) las personas en situación de teletrabajo no invirtieron más tiempo que aquellos padres que asistían presencialmente a trabajar. Las conclusiones e implicaciones de este estudio se expondrán durante la conferencia

Eye movements of deaf students in expository versus narrative texts

Text comprehension, a daily academic activity in primary and secondary school, is especially challenging for deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) students. The present study analyzed the effect of text genre (narrative vs. expository) on accuracy and eye-movement patterns during text comprehension by DHH students (ages 9-15 years) when compared to a typically hearing (TH) control group matched for chronological age. Comprehension accuracy was found to be similar across text genres for both groups, though TH participants outperformed DHH participants. Regarding eye movements, both groups spent more time and made more regressive fixations in the expository text than in the narrative text, but DHH participants showed longer saccade amplitude in the expository than in the narrative, which could be interpreted as indicating better self-regulation of DHH readers in the easiest and more familiar narrative text structure

Time-Course of Grammatical processing in deaf readers: an eye-movement study

Research funded by Universitat de Valéncia (Atracció de talent/UV-INV-PREDOC17F1-5405).Twenty participants who were deaf and 20 chronological age-matched participants with typical hearing (TH) (mean age: 12 years) were asked to judge the correctness of written sentences with or without a grammatically incongruent word while their eye movements were registered. TH participants outperformed deaf participants in grammaticality judgment accuracy. For both groups, First Pass and Total Fixation Times of target words in correct trials were significantly longer in the incongruent condition than in the congruent one. However, whereas TH students showed longer First Pass in the target area than deaf students across congruity conditions, deaf students made more fixations than their TH controls. Syntactic skills, vocabulary, and word reading speeds (measured with additional tests) were significantly lower in deaf students but only syntactic skills were systematically associated to the time-course of congruity processing. These results suggest that syntactic skills could have a cascading effect in sentence processing for deaf readers.Universitat de Valénci

Actas IX Jornadas ERI Lectura: 10 Años de investigación y transferencia, Valencia, junio de 2023

Con motivo del 10 aniversario de la Estructura de Recerca Interdisciplinar en Lectura (ERI Lectura, Universitat de València), este documento recoge una representación de las principales líneas de investigación: procesos de lectura, escritura, lectura en población diversa, tecnología para evaluar y enseñar, lectura crítica, promoción de la lectura y enseñanza de la competencia lectora. Los trabajos que se muestran fueron presentados en las IX Jornadas, celebradas los días 20, 22 y 23 de junio de 2023 en la Facultat de Psicologia i Logopèdia de la Universitat de València.Amb motiu del 10è aniversari de l'Estructura de Recerca Interdisciplinar en Lectura (ERI Lectura, Universitat de València), aquest document recull una representació de les principals línies de recerca: processos de lectura, escriptura, lectura en població diversa, tecnologia per avaluar i ensenyar , lectura crítica, promoció de la lectura i ensenyament de la competència lectora. Els treballs que es mostren van ser presentats a les IX Jornades, celebrades els dies 20, 22 i 23 de juny de 2023 a la Facultat de Psicologia i Logopèdia de la Universitat de València.For the 10th anniversary of the Estructura de Recerca Interdisciplinar en Lectura (ERI Lectura, Universitat de València), this document gathers a representation of the main research lines: reading processes, writing, reading in diverse population, technology for assessing and teaching, critical reading, reading promotion and teaching of reading competence. These works were presented at the IX Conference, held on June 20, 22 and 23, 2023 at the Faculty of Psychology and Speech Therapy of the University of Valencia

Effects of telework and digitalization on shared reading between parents and children [Efectos del teletrabajo y la digitalización en la lectura compartida entre padres e hijos]

INTRODUCTION. There are several benefits associated with shared reading. The time families invest to read with their children may be influenced by different demographic (e.g., family type and structure) and personal factors (e.g., time availability). Society experiments subsequent changes and the time dedicated to shared reading at home may be influenced by them. This study has two main objectives: first, it analyzes differences in shared reading time by considering those demographic variables that other studies have identified as relevant (e.g., parents' sex, children's age, number of children); secondly, it aims to analyze the differences in shared reading time re garding two variables strongly affected by the pandemic, that is, the employment status and read ing medium (paper reading vs. digital reading). METHOD. The responses of 659 parents to a survey about reading habits before and after confinement were analysed through a descriptive comparative analysis of demographic variables, parents' employment status and reading support. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION. The main results indicate that families spent increasing amounts of time on shared reading throughout confinement. In this sense, mothers spent more time read ing with their children than fathers before and during confinement. Regarding the reading me dium, paper continued to be used more widely for shared reading during confinement, although the time dedicated to shared reading using a digital device increased compared to its use before confinement. Finally, parents who teleworked did not invest more time on shared reading than those who worked outside the home, so that, contrary to expectations, teleworking during the pandemic did not allow for a better family-profession reconciliation or greater dedication to chil dren's literac

Eye movements of deaf students in expository versus narrative texts

Text comprehension, a daily academic activity at primary and secondary school, is especially challenging for deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) students. The present study was aimed at analysing the effect of text genre (narrative vs. expository) on accuracy and eye movement patterns during the text comprehension of DHH students (age range: 9-15 years) users of oral language as preferred communication mode in relation to a typically hearing (TH) chronological age-matched control group. Results showed that comprehension accuracy was similar across text genres for both groups and that TH participants outperformed DHH participants. Regarding eye movements, both groups spent longer time and made more regressive fixations in the expository than in the narrative text but DHH participants showed longer saccade amplitude in the expository than the narrative text which could be interpreted as evidence of better self-regulation of DHH readers in the easiest and more familiar narrative text structure