Background: Deaf adolescents have often been characterized as weaker readers compared to their typically-hearing peers. However, with earlier intervention and advances in hearing technology, a positive trend in reading comprehension has been noted among adolescents with cochlear implants, despite significant inter-individual variability in performance. However, cochlear implants do not transmit speech-related spectro-temporal cues properly. Therefore, cued speech, a lip-reading support enabling the development of accurate phonological representations, might positively impact reading acquisition. This study aimed to examine reading comprehension abilities of deaf adolescents with implants, aged 10 to 15, who use or do not use cued speech at home.

Method: Fourteen cued speech users (CS group), fourteen non-cued speech users (nonCS group) and twenty-eight typically-hearing adolescents (TH group) performed two reading comprehension tasks (sentence and text) and a nonverbal IQ (a spatial short-term memory task and a nonverbal reasoning task).

Results: In sentence comprehension, there were no differences between CS and TH groups as regards accuracy and total response time. However, nonCS group had a worse performance and a longer response time than the two other groups, with specific difficulties regarding personal pronouns. As regards text comprehension, TH group had better performances than nonCS group in total score, principal idea, detail, prediction, context and explanation but the performances of CS group did not differ from that of the two other groups. For sequential information, CS and TH groups had a better performance than nonCS group.

Conclusions: CS adolescents aged 10 to 15 achieve comparable performance in reading comprehension for sentences and texts, compared with their TH peers. NonCS adolescents seem to demonstrate more weaknesses. Overall, the data provide a better understanding of the usefulness of cued speech on reading skills. Some additional individual analyses are nevertheless needed to disentangle the impact of other factors such as age and type of education.