An investigation and comparison of lexical knowledge of deaf and hearing children

The present study examines the lexical knowledge of deaf children in two age groups of 9-10 and 10-11 years old with two groups of normal hearing children of 9-10 and 10-11 years old. This study is a casual-comparative study. The achievement of 16 deaf children (ages 9-10 and 10-11 years old) and 16 hearing children (ages 9-10 and 10-11 years old) were examined on a vocabulary assessment task which consists of two tasks namely a lexical decision task and a use decision task. The target words in both tasks represent the vocabulary children should have at the end of primary school. The results show that most hearing pupils reached this norm, whereas most of deaf pupils did not. In addition, results show that deaf pupils not only knew fewer words, but they knew them less well. Additionally, comparison of the two tasks demonstrated the efficacy of the lexical decision task as a measure of lexical semantic knowledge