Exploring the Potential Impact of Sentence-Level Comprehension and Sentence-Level Fluency on Deaf Students' Passage Comprehension

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.