AUTHOR=Ziubanova Anastasia A. , Laurinavichyute Anna K. , Parshina Olga 

TITLE=Does early exposure to spoken and sign language affect reading fluency in deaf and hard-of-hearing adult signers?

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 14 - 2023

YEAR=2023

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1145638

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1145638

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=Early linguistic background, and in particular, access to language, lays the foundation of future reading skills in deaf and hard-of-hearing signers. The current study aims to estimate the impact of two factors -early access to sign and/or spoken language -on reading fluency in deaf and hard-ofhearing adult Russian Sign Language speakers. In the eye-tracking experiment, 26 deaf and 14 hardof-hearing native Russian Sign Language speakers read 144 sentences from the Russian Sentence Corpus. Analysis of global eye-movement trajectories (scanpaths) was used to identify clusters of typical reading trajectories. The role of early access to sign and spoken language as well as vocabulary size as predictors of the more fluent reading pattern was tested. Hard-of-hearing signers with early access to sign language read more fluently than those who were exposed to sign language later in life or deaf signers without access to speech sounds. No association between early access to spoken language and reading fluency was found.