ABSTRACT Deaf individuals who learned a spoken language with the aid of a cochlear implant (CI) often experience difficulties with reading. In the present study, we investigate this issue by assessing the impact of lexical and orthographic predictors on visual word recognition in early and late deaf CI-users. Early deaf CI-users were comparable to age-matched hearing controls, for both response accuracy and latencies, whereas late deaf CI-users were slower albeit similarly accurate with respect to age-matched controls. Analyses of the impact of lexical and orthographic predictors, however, revealed that early deaf-CI users were slower than controls in recognising low frequency words and words with high proportion of consonants. In conclusion, early deaf individuals who developed their language using a CI show qualitative differences in visual word processing, above and beyond the overall performance. This suggests that typical overall performance may emerge also in the context of atypical lexical and word form representations.

中文翻译：

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用视觉词识别探索人工耳蜗用户的语言处理：词汇和正字词属性的影响

摘要 在人工耳蜗 (CI) 的帮助下学习口语的聋人经常遇到阅读困难。在本研究中，我们通过评估词汇和正字法预测器对早期和晚期失聪 CI 用户视觉词识别的影响来研究这个问题。早期聋人 CI 用户在响应准确性和延迟方面与年龄匹配的听力控制者相当，而晚期聋人 CI 用户虽然在年龄匹配的控制方面同样准确，但速度较慢。然而，对词汇和拼写预测器影响的分析表明，早期聋人 CI 用户在识别低频词和辅音比例高的词方面比对照组慢。综上所述，使用 CI 开发语言的早期聋人在视觉文字处理方面表现出质的差异，超出了整体表现。这表明典型的整体表现也可能出现在非典型的词汇和词形表示的背景下。