Assessing sensitivity to semantic and syntactic information in deaf readers: An ERP study

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Neuroscience
• Linguistics

Background:

• Previous ERP studies show differences in processing semantic vs. grammatical violations between deaf and hearing readers.
• The role of early language exposure in these differences remains unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if language deprivation explains differences in processing verb agreement violations in deaf readers.
• To compare electrophysiological responses (ERPs) to semantic, verb agreement, and phrase structure violations in deaf and hearing readers.

Main Methods:

• Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while deaf readers with early ASL exposure and reading-matched hearing readers processed English sentences with violations.
• Stimuli included semantic, verb agreement, and phrase structure violations, as well as sentence-final words to examine "wrap up" effects.

Main Results:

• Both groups showed N400 effects for semantic violations. Only hearing readers showed a P600 for verb agreement violations.
• Both groups exhibited an N400 effect on sentence-final words for agreement violations, despite lower accuracy in acceptability judgments.
• A robust P600 effect for phrase structure violations was observed in both deaf and hearing readers.

Conclusions:

• Differences in processing verb agreement are not due to language deprivation.
• Deaf readers may employ monitoring strategies anticipating English phrase structure but not verb morphology.
• Both groups demonstrate neural sensitivity to grammatical errors during sentence-final integration, suggesting distinct reading strategies for skilled deaf bilingual readers compared to hearing monolingual readers.