---

Background and Aim: Reading skill is necessary for academic achievement, that deaf children have problems in this skill due to hearing impairment. Use of cochlear implant can improve auditory inputs. The aim of this study was to investigate the reading skills of children with cochlear implants and comparing that with normal ones.

Materials and Methods: This descriptive - analytic study was done on 24 children with cochlear implant and 24 normal ones that was selected from second and third grades students of Tehran primary schools. Children's reading performance was assessed by Nama reading test and the data were analyzed using T-test, linear regression and Pearson correlations.

Results: The results showed that the means of reading scores of normal children were significantly greater than the cochlear implanted ones (P<0.01). Also, there was a significant relationship between reading skills and period of cochlear implant (P<0.01).

Conclusion: Cochlear implanted children showed weaker performance in reading skills than normal ones due to less access to auditory and Phonological information. It seems that early surgery and cochlear implant before the age of language learning can be partially compensated reading defects of deaf children.

---

  Background and Aim: Hearing impairment in critical period of speech and language development is caused defects in oral and written language. The aim of this study is to use a test for comparing the reading skills of elementary fifth grade hearing and moderately severe hearing loss students in public schools.
Materials and Methods: In this cross sectional study, 10 hearing impaired children selected from the total number of fifth grade moderately severe hearing loss students' community (public schools) based on the inclusion criteria and compared with 10 hearing children that were matched according to grade, as a control group. In order to gather the data, reading and writing tests for school students was used. Data analysis was done through SPSS-16.
Results: The findings indicated that hearing impaired children on auditory discrimination skills (P=0.001), word auditory memory (P=0.034) sentence auditory memory (P<0.001), phonological blending (P=0.034), phonological segmentation (P=0.012) and text reading comprehension (P=0.044) were significantly weaker than the control group, but they had similar function in other skills.
Conclusion: Children with hearing impairment have the same function in tasks based on visual processing to normal children, whereas, in tasks based on auditory and phonological processing are weaker than them. Keywords: Reading skills, Hearing loss children, Public schools