Objective: Since the written language is based on spoken language, hearing impairments may cause delays and defects in reading skills. This study is aimed to investigate reading problems in children with hearing loss and comparison of reading skills of fifth-grade elementary students’ reading skills suffering severe hearing loss.

Materials & Methods: In this cross-sectional comparative study, 16 children with hearing loss were selected based on inclusion criteria from the whole fifth-grade elementary students with severe hearing loss in the Baghcheban schools and compared with 16 normal children matched upon the grade with sample group. To gather the data, Reading Test in elementary students was used as well as SPSS for data analysis.

Results: Results showed children with hearing loss performed similarly as the control group on some skills, including naming speed skills (P=0.385), auditory-verbal sounds (reverse) memory (P=0.345), visual-verbal pictures memory (P=1), phonological deletion (P=0.817) and nonword reading accuracy (P=0.633), however, they had poorer functions in the other domains.

Conclusion: According to the result, it is concluded that auditory processing plays the key role in all prerequisite reading skills and children with hearing loss performed poorly on tasks based on auditory and language processing, whereas, the same perform on visual-processing-base tasks to normal children.