DEAFREADING - Unveiling the foundations of reading in deafness: A multifaceted investigation into letter and number recognition, lexical processing, and phonological-orthographic interplay - FHSE

The project investigates the roots of reading difficulties often encountered in the deaf population, with behavioral and EEG methods.

The project at a glance

Start date:

01 Oct 2022
Duration in months:

72
Funding:

Wallonie-Bruxelles-International (WBI) Bourses d'excellence / Wallonie-Bruxelles-International (WBI) bourses d'excellence / University of Luxembourg
Principal Investigator(s):

Aliette LOCHY

Virginie Crollen (external)

About

Deafness is a sensory deprivation that significantly impacts reading abilities. Indeed, reading is at the interface of vision and language, as one must map letter shapes to their sounds to access the meaning of words. Deaf individuals, because of their auditory deprivation, have some language difficulties, but also show specific adaptation in cognitive and neural processes related to vision. However, the roots of these reading difficulties remain largely unidentified, likely due to several limitations in existing research. Primarily, there is a notable absence of specific theoretical models of reading in deafness. Additionally, most studies have focused narrowly on the level of word recognition, overlooking the foundational role of letters in constructing words and by comparison, of Arabic digits in constructing numbers. Thus, there is an urgent need to delve deeper into how deafness affects letters and digits processing. Furthermore, while emerging evidence indicates that deaf readers rely more on orthographic sensitivity and whole-word lexical representations than on phonological mediation to comprehend written words, few studies have directly investigated the impact of these factors on visually recognizing words with varying letter-to-sound mappings (regular vs. irregular words) and in different orthographies. Finally, while in hearing individuals the neural bases of reading involve a network of left-lateralized brain regions in the ventral occipito-temporal cortex, in deaf individuals, recent neuroimaging research point to an atypical increased right-lateralized responses that seem to be adaptative as they relate to good reading performance. Here, we will combine behavioral methods and EEG recordings, using a highly sensitive paradigm based on frequency-tagging, to (1) systematically explore basic character recognition (letters/digits), (2) evaluate the influence of lexical representations on letter identification, and (3) directly assess the roles of phonology and orthography in reading words.

Organisation and Partners

Cognitive Science and Assessment Institute
Department of Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences
Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences (FHSE)
Université Catholique de Louvain

Project team

Aliette LOCHY

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Virginie Crollen

Université Catholique de Louvain, Faculté de Psychologie et des Sciences de l'Education
Christine SCHILTZ

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Lucas Rifon
Margot Buyle