The present study examined reading fluency and orthographic learning in 40 children with cochlear implants. Their age range was 6;0-10;11.The children were implanted with their (first) CI at 24 months on average and thirty-four of them were bilaterally implanted. Sixty to 70 percent of the children with CI had reading skills at or above the 45th percentile on the measures of orthographic and phonological word reading fluency. Speech perception in silence was moderately associated with both reading fluency and orthographic learning. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that phonological decoding was a strong predictor of orthographic learning after age and non-verbal skills were accounted for. Receptive vocabulary, verbal fluency and verbal-verbal paired-associate learning predicted additional variance in orthographic learning after phonological decoding was controlled for.

Phoneme awareness was the strongest predictor of both orthographic- and phonological- and decoding fluency after age and nonverbal skills were controlled. Age at implantation was not a significant predictor of any of the measures of readingor orthographic learning.

These results resemble the pattern typically found in normal hearing children and suggests that phonemic awareness and phonological decoding are crucial for orthographic learning and reading fluency in children with CI.