Building the alphabetic principle in young children who are deaf or hard of hearing

Acquisition of phoneme-grapheme correspondences, a key concept of the alphabetic principle, was examined in young children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) using a semantic association strategy embedded in two interventions, the Children's Early Intervention and Foundations for Literacy. Single-subject design experiments using multiple baselines across content were used to examine the functional relationship between student outcomes and the intervention provided. Only students who were able to identify spoken words were included in the studies. Study One was conducted with 5 children 3.10-7.10 years of age in oral or signing programs. Study Two was conducted with 5 children 3.10-4.5 years of age in an oral program. All children acquired taught phoneme-grapheme correspondences. These findings provide much-needed evidence that children who are DHH and who have some speech perception abilities can learn critical phoneme-grapheme correspondences through explicit auditory skill instruction with language and visual support.