Associations between word decoding, sign language comprehension and reading comprehension in deaf and hard-of-hearing children who are learning to read Emil Holmer1, Mikael Heimann2, & Mary Rudner1 1 Linnaeus Centre HEAD, Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning, Linköping University, Sweden 2 Division of Psychology and Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning, Linköping University, Sweden Background For beginning readers, word decoding typically explains more of the variance in reading comprehension than language comprehension The relative contribution of decoding respectively language comprehension might be different for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children who use sign language We investigated the relationship between sign language comprehension, word decoding and reading comprehension in DHH signing children at an early stage of reading development and sign language comprehension was predicted to be positively associated with reading comprehension Methods Participants (Table 1) 22 DHH signing children (9 male), age 9.5 years (SD = 2.1) Test battery Reading comprehension: Woodcock Passage Reading Comprehension Test Swedish Sign Language (SSL) comprehension: 16 participants did an SSL adaptation of British Sign Language Receptive Skills Test, and 6 an SSL adaptation of TROG-2 (one outlier was detected, 3 SD below mean, and was excluded from analyses) Word decoding: Word chains Results Correlations indicated that SSL comprehension (r = .45, p = .04, Figure 1), but not word decoding (r = 37, p = .10, Figure 2), was positively associated with reading comprehension Two hierarchical linear regression models were calculated (see Table 2) Word decoding did not explain any additional variance when entered after SSL comprehension Adding SSL comprehension as a predictor after word decoding, indicated a marginally significant effect Conclusion For DHH signing children, language comprehension might be more important than word decoding in text comprehension at early stages of reading development Acknowledgements Part of the data was included in a master thesis by Anders Hermansson. Table 1 Participant demographics. Proportion Additional developmental or medical disability 14% Technical aids: Cochlear implant(s) Hearing aid(s) Cochlear implant/Hearing aid 36% Born in Sweden 50% Figure 1. Scatterplot between SSL comprehension (x-axis) and reading comprehension (y-axis). Figure 2. Scatterplot between word decoding (x-axis) and reading comprehension (y-axis). Table 2 Hierarchical linear regression models. ΔR2 β Model 1 Step 1 SSL comprehension 22%* .47* Step 2 Word decoding 3% .40† .18 Model 2 11% .33 13%† *p < .05. †p < .10. Contact information: emil.holmer@liu.se 4th International Conference on Cognitive Hearing Science for Communication 18-21 June 2017, Linköping, Sweden