How to Design Games for Deaf Children: Evidence-Based Guidelines - 2nd International Workshop on Evidence-Based Technology Enhanced Learning - page 82

Table 1 Reading

CONSTRAINT BIB GL #

- Word recall by deaf seems poor for long words, as well as for ab-
stract, ambiguous or unfamiliar words without contextual clues.
- Deaf children's vocabulary skills are better when words have only a
single meaning or when they are presented in context. Unfamiliar
words, or words which have not been specifically introduced to the stu-
dent, cannot be lip-read.
- Reading involves using of the centre of visual field to fixate the word
for hearing children. Therefore the fact that deaf children pay more at-
tention to items in the periphery could partially cause confusion in the
identification of letters and words.

[1;2;7;13
;
30;31;35]

3.1.1
3.1.2
3.1.3
3.2.2
3.2.3

- Deaf individuals seem to have problems with complex sentences, in
particular, with cohesive devices and referential expressions.
- Deaf students tend to remember disconnected portions of the text ra-
ther than the whole picture, especially when the material is unfamiliar.

[24;25;
31;35]

3.2.1
3.2.3

- Deaf readers, like good hearing readers, use metacognitive strategies
to monitor and maintain comprehension, but are less accurate in their
meta-comprehension.
- Deaf readers seem to benefit from a “windowed reading” whereby on-
ly limited amounts of text are made available at any one time

[19;17] 3.2.2

3.2.3

- They prefer reading short texts and topics with pictures.
- When deaf children are reading topics, the teacher often has to recall the attention
of the children and indicate the point where they were reading..
- Deaf children are likely to have problems with: tapping global coherence as well as
local cohesion; complex periods and, in particular, co-references; decoding; phonolo-
gy.
- Instructions are not always read; deaf children read them only if they appear before
the start of the activity.

3.1.2
3.2.2
3.2.3
3.2.4

Table 2 Visual attention

CONSTRAINT BIB GL #

- Deafness leads to changes not in all aspects of vision but specifically
in visual attention and alteration of attention abilities.
- Deaf individuals seem better in certain aspects of visual perception
and specifically at allocating visual attention to the periphery of the
visual field.
- Deaf signers seem to be more distracted by peripheral events and
hearing individuals are more distracted by central events.

[1;2;3;
5;7;17;
36;37;]

3.2.2
3.2.3
3.3.1

Young children have more difficulties for serial recall and take more
time for recovering attention.

[14] 3.2.2

Deaf individuals are better than hearing individuals in orienting visual
attention from one location to another, and are more affected by the
presence of distractors, that is, they are less good in selective attention ,
whereas no difference was found in divided attention that is the ability
of processing multiple stimuli in the visual field.

[6;7] 3.2.3

3.3.1
3.3.2
3.3.3

In deaf individuals the ability to discriminate very small differences in
direction of motion is altered and more deaf subjects discriminated
gross differences in direction as leftward vs rightward.

[12] 3.3.3