The purpose of our study was to investigate the ASL-PA skills of
deaf children and adolescents whose first language is ASL and who
are second-language readers of English. We examined students' performance
on a phonological similarity judgment task designed to tap
their awareness of the phonological structure of ASL. The task required
discrimination of minimal contrasts in signs across three comparison
conditions: signs that shared three parameters, signs that shared two
parameters, and signs that were differentiated by a single parameter. In
addition to our question about the extent of phonological elaboration
in the underlying representations of deaf children, we were interested
in identifying the relationships between ASL-PA and English wordlevel
reading and comprehension measures. The results contribute to
our current understanding of differences in difficulty among various
phonological parameters and the relationships between ASL-PA and
measures of English word recognition and reading comprehension