The Influence of Congenital Deafness on Processes Concerned with Reading: An Initial Investigation

The congenitally deaf child learns visual symbols instead of the auditory-vocal symbols learned by normal children. To test whether these visual symbols are learned by a prototypic or distinctive feature perceptual learning process, a match-to-sample perceptual learning and transfer procedure was used with deaf first-grade children. Evidence for distinctive feature learning was found. The implications of this result for reading are discussed.