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Do native signers have difficulty reading written text?
Yes. This is a well-studied phenomenon. Deaf people whose first language is a sign language often do face difficulty when reading written language. The reason is not cognitive ability. It is a matter of linguistics and language acquisition. Written language is essentially a visual encoding of spoken language. Hearing children already have years of spoken-language immersion before reading; deaf children whose first language is ASL, CSL, or another sign language often approach English or Chinese as a second language, and one without accessible spoken-language support. Empirical work in the United States, including Gallaudet-related longitudinal research, has often found deaf high-school graduates around a fourth-grade median English reading level. Reports in mainland China similarly show delays in written Chinese, especially with function words, passive constructions, complex clauses, metaphor, idioms, and forms that depend on spoken-language and pragmatic experience. There is large variation: early sign-language exposure and bilingual education, sign language as L1 and written language as L2, generally produce much better reading outcomes. This is a core motivation for SLP and SLT: text-to-sign generation addresses a real accessibility gap in news, public notices, medical instructions, and educational materials.
But why do they not just learn text? Their parents usually know English text. In theory, should they not learn text first rather than sign language?
That intuition is natural, but it depends on a false premise. Parents knowing text does not mean a child can acquire text from them. Writing is not acquired directly; it is a second-order system built on top of an already acquired natural language. Hearing children do not learn text first. They acquire spoken language from age zero to five, then school teaches them to map that known language onto symbols. Deaf children often lack full access to that underlying natural language. You cannot skip language and teach writing directly. The critical-period literature, including work by Mayberry and Newport, shows that early complete language input is crucial; language deprivation can permanently harm later language, second-language learning, and reading. Sign language is not a competitor to reading. It is the foundation for reading. Parents also cannot provide rich language immersion through print: writing apple and pointing to an apple is sparse, slow, and abstract compared with real-time language in daily life. History already tried suppressing sign language through oralism, especially after the 1880 Milan Conference, and the results were disastrous. The correct causal chain is this: deaf children do not read poorly because they learned sign language. Deaf children with early access to a full sign language often learn written language better; those deprived of sign language and forced to rely on incomplete speech or print usually have the worst text outcomes. For SLP and SLT, automatic text-to-sign generation is not a lazy compromise. It provides information through an accessible natural-language modality.
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