[senco-forum] Re Teaching vocabulary

Sharon contributes: Deaf people 'read' without sound.  They can see, comprehend, manipulate and use the symbols before them without ever hearing them. I have a problem with this. 'Losing' their hearing after having been able to hear, does not of course preclude learning to read nor does the possession of only some residual hearing. Why should it? I have considerable age-related hearing loss myself but this does not affect my abilty to read. Those who are profoundly deaf from birth and have never had any hearing are very rare indeed but it is my understanding that such people can never learn to read. A profoundly deaf person is apparently (and understandably) also mute. Henry VIII is said to have put a new born baby on an island with a deaf mute nurse to settle an argument about how speech was acquired.  Naturally, all the child could do was to emulate the calls of the seagulls. One researcher taught a profoundly deaf mute to recognise some words printed on cards together with a picture of their meaning eg a picture of a dog with the textword 'dog' printed underneath.  This person acquired a limited sight vocabulary of a few hundred words which enabled them to acquire a very limited form of reading - but very limited! The graphemes in the text their learned could never be associated with sounds therefore they could never generalise a decoding skill because sound is a critical component of decoding. I regard words as sounds and that in reading, these sounds are recreated from the text sub-vocally.  This summons their meanings from memory as well as a cascade of associations which we call comprehension.   Eddie C.