Reading skills of hearing and moderately severe hearing loss children in ordinary schools

Hearing impairment in critical period of speech and language development is caused defects in oral and written language. The aim of this study is to use a test for comparing the reading skills of elementary fifth grade hearing and moderately severe hearing loss students in public schools. In this cross sectional study، 10 hearing impaired children selected from the total number of fifth grade moderately severe hearing loss students'' community (public schools) based on the inclusion criteria and compared with 10 hearing children that were matched according to grade، as a control group. In order to gather the data، reading and writing tests for school students was used. Data analysis was done through SPSS-16. The findings indicated that hearing impaired children on auditory discrimination skills (P=0. 001)، word auditory memory (P=0. 034) sentence auditory memory (P<0. 001)، phonological blending (P=0. 034)، phonological segmentation (P=0. 012) and text reading comprehension (P=0. 044) were significantly weaker than the control group، but they had similar function in other skills. Children with hearing impairment have the same function in tasks based on visual processing to normal children، whereas، in tasks based on auditory and phonological processing are weaker than them.