The literacy skills of deaf children generally lag behind those of their hearing peers. The mechanisms of reading in deaf individuals are only just beginning to be unraveled but it seems that nativelanguage skills play an important role. In this study 12 deaf pupils (six in grades 1–2 and six in grades 4–6) at a Swedish state primary school for deafand hard of hearing children were trained on theconnection between Swedish Sign Language andwritten Swedish using a pilot sign languageversion of the literacy training software program Omega-is