Abstract
Phonological awareness is a form of metalinguistic awareness that has been studied intensively because of its relation to schooling and the acquisition of literacy. However, much of this research has been confined to languages with alphabetic scripts such as English. It has been noted that children who are born deaf or acquire deafness very early in life before they have learned their native language and those who are raised in an aural-oral environment do develop some awareness of letter-sound mappings and other spelling regularities by drawing on information from lip-reading and residual hearing. Such children nevertheless have to do a lot of catching up in language in order to be effectively integrated in schoolwork. There is limited published evidence about the role of phonological awareness in the acquisition and mastery of languages with non-alphabetic writing systems associated with some of the Indian languages. Specific literacy acquisition problems faced by hearing-impaired children studying in regular schools in India have not been examined within a linguistic perspective. This paper describes the results of an empirical study involving 15 normal hearing children (average age: 10 years) and 15 hearing-impaired children (average age: 14 years), all native speakers of Telugu studying in Telugu-medium schools. Using specially designed syllable manipulation tasks, the quantitative and qualitative differences in the processing of the written word of the two groups were examined. Some of the theoretical and clinical implications of the results are discussed in this paper.
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