Fingerspelling and Print: Understanding the Word Reading of Deaf Children

Scott, J. A., Hansen, S. G., & Lederberg, A. R. (2019). Fingerspelling and print: Understanding the word reading of deaf children. American Annals of the Deaf, 164(4), 429–449. Fingerspelling and Print: Understanding the Word Reading of Deaf Children Jessica A. Scott, Sarah G. Hansen, and Amy R. Lederberg Fingerspelling and its relationship with literacy skills among deaf and hard of hearing children who use American Sign Language is an increasingly popular research topic. However, there is limited research on whether reading interventions that systematically include fingerspelling are more effective for improving literacy skills than reading interventions that do not. In an adapted alternat- ing-treatment single-case study, the authors contrasted the number of words learned under three conditions: a productive fingerspelling condition, in which word reading was taught through ac- tivities that emphasized productive fingerspelling; a chaining condition, in which teachers chained written words with receptive fingerspelling; and a sign-to-print condition, in which fingerspelling was not used. Five of the 6 participants learned most of the words taught with no differentiation by condition. Participants could recognize and fingerspell taught words, even if those words were not taught via fingerspelling. Keywords: Deaf education, American Sign Language, fingerspelling, reading, literacy Although there is increasing research in potential contribution of alternate coding deaf education addressing questions of systems such as fingerspelling (letters of language and literacy development, there the alphabet represented through hand- is little evidence on specific interventions shapes), visemes (representations of speech to improve the literacy skills of deaf and sounds as seen on the lips and mouth hard of hearing (DHH) students ( Cannon, during speaking), or handshapes (hand Guardino, Antia, & Luckner, 2016). There positions that are used in the execution is evidence to suggest that reading out- of individual signs) for word recognition comes are improving among some groups and reading (Elliott, Braun, Kuhlmann, of DHH learners (Easterbrooks & & Jacobs, 2012; Haptonstall-Nykaza & Beal- Alvarez, 2012), but identification Schick, 2007; Sehyr, Petrich, & Emmorey, of the route to print access used by these 2016). Specifically for those students who learners remains unclear. For example, use American Sign Language (ASL) to deaf education research is divided on communicate, more research is needed on such issues as the relative contribution of the relative contribution of such coding phonology both within and between mo- systems to reading development. In the dalities (i.e., spoken language and signed present study, we examined one such cod- language; Holmer, Heimann, & Rudner, ing system— fingerspelling—and whether 2016; Mayer & Trezek, 2014), and the and how the use of fingerspelling enhanced All three authors are affiliated with Georgia State University, Atlanta. Scott is an assistant professor, Department of Learning Sciences. Hansen is an assistant professor, Department of Learning Sciences. Lederberg is Regents’ Professor and professor emerita, Department of Learning Sciences, and principal investigator, Center on Literacy and Deafness. 429 01_Scott.indd 429 07/11/19 2:20 PM 430 American Annals of the Deaf, Volume 164, No. 4, 2019 signing DHH children’s ability to learn not only drawing upon orthographic and novel words. semantic information but also accessing knowledge of German Sign Language Dual-Route Cascaded Model lexicon and spoken-German visemes. For of Reading the indirect route, Elliott et al. argued that rather than access phonology directly, the The dual-route cascaded (DRC) model of deaf adults in their study accessed pho- reading was initially proposed by Coltheart, nology via means of acquiring visemic Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler (2001). information such as speechreading. Others According to this model, phonemic and have examined the role of phonology for lexical routes to word reading provide in- deaf adults reading in French, finding that creasing cues to facilitate word recognition; study participants favored an orthographic this conceptualization is in contrast with route to word reading (Bélanger, Baum, & the previously held notion that visual and Mayberry, 2012). Though valuable, both auditory input must reach a certain thresh- studies considered the word reading of old before the reader is able to identify the deaf adults rather than children, and thus written word. Per the DRC model, when were more likely reflect the word reading presented with a printed word, the reader process for more fluent readers, which may may follow one of two routes: The first is a differ from the word reading process of de- direct route, which allows the reader access veloping readers. to the meaning of the word she is reading directly from the print. The second route Fingerspelling and Literacy relies on sublexical information sources before arriving at the phonemic represen- Evidence has been mounting in support tation of the word. In essence, one route of the importance of fingerspelling in the to reading brings the reader directly from language and literacy development of the printed letters to the pronunciation DHH children (Allen, 2015; Emmorey, of the spoken word, while the other in- McCullough, & Weisberg, 2015; volves retrieval of lexical information via Haptonstall-Nykaza & Schick, 2007; orthographic and semantic data. The DRC Mounty, Pucci, & Harmon, 2014; Stone, model has been found by some to have Katheiser, Hauser, Pettito, & Allen, 2015). better explanatory power for skills such Because of its through-the-air represen- as pronunciation of nonwords (Pritchard, tation of orthography, fingerspelling has Coltheart, Palethorpe, & Castles, 2012), been thought of as a potential link between oral reading, and visual word recognition ASL and English (Mounty et al., 2014). In- (Coltheart et al., 2001). There is also ev- deed, there is even neuroscientific evidence idence that the DRC model aligns with that print words and fingerspelled words reading approaches that are effective for are processed similarly by deaf readers students with dyslexia (Ziegler et al., 2008). ( Emmorey et al., 2015). However, there is not There has been limited research on the yet sufficient research on how these relation- application of the DRC model to DHH ships may be applied to teaching practice. readers. In the only study of its kind, Elliott A number of researchers have found a et al. (2012) argued that deaf adults in relationship between fingerspelling and Germany utilize a modified version of the literacy skills at various ages. Fingerspelling DRC model in which the sublexical route has been found to predict emergent literacy these readers take to word reading includes among young DHH children (Allen, 2015). 01_Scott.indd 430 07/11/19 2:20 PM Fingerspelling and Print 431 Fingerspelling has also been correlated with printed word without explicit instruction reading comprehension ability and English in sublexical structures such as phonol- vocabulary knowledge among adult DHH ogy or fingerspelling. Similarly, a sight readers (Emmorey & Petrich, 2011; Stone word intervention using a single-case et al., 2015). In fact, fingerspelling appears design demonstrated that systematic re- to contribute to scores on a measure of peated exposure to sight words supported reading proficiency over and above the ef- kindergarten-age DHH children in their fects of ASL proficiency—in other words, acquisition of these words (Davenport, it is not ASL proficiency in general, but the Konrad, & Alber-Morgan, 2018). How- specific skill of fingerspelling, that may be ever, there is evidence that DHH children important to the development of reading may learn words better in conditions that skills of signing DHH readers (Lederberg emphasize orthographic patterns; such et al., 2019; Stone et al., 2015). evidence suggests that an indirect route On the whole, these studies suggest emphasizing sublexical structures may be both that DHH children make connections a more successful way to teach DHH chil- between fingerspelled and written words dren to read words (Reitsma, 2008). and that explicit instruction that includes There are interventions that focus on fingerspelling may support literacy devel- the indirect route and attempt to teach opment. However, the use of fingerspelling DHH children to decode written words via as a bridge to word reading is not without spoken phonology. For instance, Fairview its critics. Some have rightly criticized the Learning (Ausbrooks-Rusher, Schimmel, & field for failing to provide sufficient evi- Edwards, 2012) is a commonly used liter- dence that DHH learners could use either acy intervention that teaches children to fingerspelling or signs to connect with the read words through sight word instruction written word without also having suffi- (the direct route) and through phonology cient phonological knowledge or through instruction (the indirect route). Similarly, reliance on spoken phonology (Wang, the Science Research Associates (SRA) Trezek, Luckner, & Paul, 2008). In the pres- Direct Instruction (DI) program is a word ent study, we attempt to contribute to the reading intervention that is based on tra- knowledge base in this area. ditional phonological decoding (Patker, 1997). To make spoken phonology more Word Reading Interventions visually accessible for DHH learners, re- With DHH Learners searchers have used Visual Phonics

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