Academic verb knowledge of DHH college students and their hearing peers.

This study addressed the critical gap in research on the academic English vocabulary knowledge of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students at the college level, with a specific focus on academic English verbs. An English vocabulary test was developed to assess knowledge of academic verbs at three distinct corpus-defined lexical frequency ranges. The test was administered to the DHH students along with two comparison groups of college peers-students of English as an Additional Language (EAL)1 and hearing native-English-speaking students. Results revealed near-ceiling performance by hearing native speakers but significant vocabulary challenges in the DHH and EAL learner groups, who exhibited parallel lexical knowledge. Learner group performance increased as verb frequency range increased and as overall English proficiency level increased. The findings demonstrate that lexical frequency effects guide English verb acquisition in the targeted populations.2.