Identifying text-based factors that contribute to the superior reading efficiency of skilled deaf readers: An eye-tracking study of length, frequency, and predictability.

Skilled deaf readers are more efficient than their hearing counterparts-they read faster, skipping more words without a negative impact on comprehension. It is not clear from where deaf readers' efficiency derives, because reading is a complex cognitive process that requires readers to extract meaning from text, incorporating visual, lexical, and contextual information. To assess the contributions of these factors to deaf readers' efficiency, we tracked their eye movements as they read sentences with target words that were manipulated for length, frequency, and predictability, and we assessed the effects of those variables on skipping probability (i.e., whether the reader skipped or fixated the target) and gaze duration (i.e., the amount of time spent fixating the word before leaving it) and compared these patterns to hearing readers with equivalent reading comprehension skill. Deaf readers demonstrated increased skipping rates and shorter gaze durations overall compared to hearing readers and exhibited different patterns of word length and predictability effects, but similar frequency effects. Deaf readers' eye movements reflect visual linguistic processing expertise as they are primarily driven by word length when targeting words for fixation, but frequency and predictability effects on word skipping indicate that they do engage in parafoveal linguistic processing. These results emphasize the qualitative differences in reading strategies between deaf and hearing readers and advance our understanding of the impact of early language and sensory experiences on reading behaviors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).