Abstract
The ability of “cloze” procedures to assess morphologico-syntactic and semantic differences between deaf and hearing groups matched on reading achievement scores was investigated. The experimental group consisted of 37 students, average age 16–10, mean grade reading score 4.77 on the Stanford Achievement Test, attending a residential school for the deaf. The control group, 37 fourth and fifth grade hearing children, had a mean reading score of 4.84 and an average age of 9–10. Passages of 250 words were developed from fourth, sixth, and eighth grade textbooks. The performance of the hearing subjects was superior on all measures for each passage, supporting the thesis that standardized tests spuriously raise estimates of reading ability of the deaf and that the relative inferiority of the deaf can be traced to both grammatical and semantic inadequacies. The sensitivity of “cloze” procedures to these factors was established and future applications of the technique discussed.
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