Purpose
This exploratory study aimed to investigate the potential impact of sentence-level comprehension and sentence-level fluency on passage comprehension of deaf students in elementary school.
Method
A total of 159 deaf students, 65 students (
M
age
= 13.46 years) in Grades 3 and 4 and 94 students (
M
age
= 14.95 years) in Grades 5 and 6, were assessed for nonverbal intelligence, vocabulary knowledge, sentence-level comprehension, sentence-level fluency, and passage comprehension. Group differences were examined using
t
tests, whereas the predictive and mediating mechanisms were examined using regression modeling.
Results
The regression analyses showed that the effect of sentence-level comprehension on passage comprehension was not significant, whereas sentence-level fluency was an independent predictor in Grades 3–4. Sentence-level comprehension and fluency contributed significant variance to passage comprehension in Grades 5–6. Sentence-level fluency fully mediated the influence of sentence-level comprehension on passage comprehension in Grades 3–4, playing a partial mediating role in Grades 5–6.
Conclusions
The relative contributions of sentence-level comprehension and fluency to deaf students' passage comprehension varied, and sentence-level fluency mediated the relationship between sentence-level comprehension and passage comprehension.
