Cognitive constraints on learning to read in children with an intellectual disability who are deaf or hard of hearing

Learning to read is challenging for children who have hearing impairments and concurrent intellectual disabilities because they face barriers due to both conditions. In many developmental domains, including executive functioning and language development, auditory and intellectual disabilities mutually influence each other; a deficit in one domain hinders coping mechanisms to compensate for distortions in the other. The resulting impact is more than the sum of the parts. It affects the way students learn to read and the way they process written text in many ways. Little is known about the key factors in literacy development for children with both hearing impairments and intellectual disabilities. This chapter integrates recent findings on reading development in children with both of these conditions to define a research base for two exploratory studies on literacy attainment in these learners. Recommendations for literacy education are based on these studies.