This study attempted to determine whether phonological decoding could be observed amongseverely and profoundly deaf children during reading. For this purpose, the ability of 20 deafchildren to detect phonological similarities between three written pseudowords (a model item andtwo test items) was investigated. In the first condition, one of the test items was a homophone ofthe model (e.g., kise, kyse, kine). In the second condition, oneof the test items had the same first syllable as the model item, as defined by its structure or bynasalization (e.g., lan.jier, lan.du, la.nud). The resultsdemonstrated that deaf children with good speech levels, as well as hearing children matched onword reading level, were sensitive to homophony when visual proximity between the model andtest items were controlled. They were also sensitive to syllabic structure when the first syllableswere CV and in the nasalization condition. By contrast, deaf children with poor speech abilitiesdid not show this pattern of results in all conditions. The possibility that the latter results could beexplained by deaf children's sensitivity to orthographic frequency phenomena is discussed.A link between sensitivity to phonology in written language and speech skills is suggested, and theimplications of those results for a general understanding of the reading processes of deaf childrenare presented.