On the Influence of Familiarity on Deaf Students' Text Recall

This study examined the influence of prior knowledge on third-grade reading-level deaf students' comprehension. After assessment of prior knowledge by the use of explicit text-based pre-questions, 15 deaf students, nine older and six younger, silently read three familiar (i.e., baseball) and three unfamiliar (i.e., curling) paragraphs. After reading each paragraph, students retold the paragraph using sign and/or oral communication. Probe questions were used whenever students' retell was incomplete. Results on prequestion, retell, and probe responses indicated that younger deaf readers' prior knowledge and general comprehension of these paragraphs approximated that of older readers. Even though these familiar and unfamiliar paragraphs were written at third-grade reading level and were structurally equivalent (word frequency, propositions, argument repetitions, and grammar), among topic (i.e., sports) paragraphs, the rate of recall for familiar paragraphs was significantly better than for unfamiliar ones. This study concluded that familiarity with the topic strongly impinges on the deaf readers' understanding of written text.