Keyword Reading Strategy

The keyword reading strategy is a sentence-comprehension approach in which a reader focuses primarily on high-content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) to derive the meaning of a sentence, while paying less attention to function words (determiners, prepositions, and conjunctions) and grammatical relationships. Research in deaf education and literacy has found that many deaf adults use this strategy when reading English text, identifying the most frequent content words to construct a representation of meaning. This has important implications for captioning accessibility: errors in automatically generated captions that affect unpredictable, high-content keywords are far more damaging to comprehension for DHH readers than errors on easily predictable function words, even though standard speech recognition metrics like Word Error Rate treat all errors equally.