Syllabic organization and deafness: Orthographic structure or letter frequency in reading?

For hearing people, structure given to orthographic information may be infl uenced by phonological structures that develop with experience of spoken la nguage. In this study we examine whether profoundly deaf individuals struct ure orthographic representation differently. We ask "Would deaf students wh o are advanced readers show effects of syllable structure despite their alt ered experience of spoken language, or would they, because of reduced influ ence from speech, organize their orthographic knowledge according to groupi ngs defined by letter frequency?" We used a task introduced by Prinzmetal ( Prinzmetal, Treiman, & Rho, 1986) in which participants were asked to judge the colour of letters in briefly presented words. As with hearing particip ants, the number of errors made by deaf participants was influenced by syll able structure (Prinzmetal et al., 1986; Rapp, 1992). This effect could not be accounted for by letter frequency. Furthermore, there was no correlatio n between the strength of syllable effects and residual speech or hearing. Our results support the view that the syllable is a unit of linguistic orga nization that is abstract enough to apply to both spoken and written langua ge.