Predicting Reading Fluency in Chinese Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students: Contributions of Character Recognition, Expressive Vocabulary, and Syntactic Awareness

To explore the roles of character recognition, expressive vocabulary, and syntactic awareness in deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students' reading fluency, 52 Chinese DHH students (mean age = 13.29 years) in elementary school participated in the present study. The results showed that character recognition, expressive vocabulary, and syntactic awareness significantly predicted DHH students' reading fluency after age and nonverbal reasoning ability were controlled for. Specifically, character recognition and syntactic awareness uniquely and significantly accounted for the variance in reading fluency beyond the effect of the other two predictors in children in lower grades (grades 1-3), whereas the unique effects of expressive vocabulary and syntactic awareness were significant in children in higher grades (grades 4-6). These findings suggested that these three factors are important to Chinese DHH students' reading fluency, but that their relative contributions vary across different stages in elementary school.