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Assessing sensitivity to semantic and syntactic information in deaf readers: An ERP study
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Poster A127 in Poster Session A, Tuesday, October 24, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Emily M. Akers1,2, Katherine J. Midgley1, Phillip J. Holcomb1, Karen Emmorey1; 1San Diego State University, 2University of California, San Diego
A previous study by Mehravari et al. (2017) found ERP differences between deaf and hearing readers when they read RSVP sentences that contained semantic errors (The machine quickly hopes complicated tasks.), syntactic agreement errors (The machines quickly performs complicated tasks.), double violations with both types of errors (The machines quickly hopes complicated tasks.), or no errors (The machines quickly perform complicated tasks.). The ERP components of interest were the N400 (sensitive to semantic errors) and the P600 (sensitive to syntactic errors). Mehravari et al. (2017) found that deaf and hearing readers had a similar pattern of N400 effects to semantic errors, but only hearing readers showed a clear P600 effect for agreement errors in the single and double violation sentences. There are several possible explanations for the lack of a syntactic P600 effect for deaf readers. First most of the deaf participants were bilingual in American Sign Language (ASL), and the cross-linguistic dissimilarity (lack of transfer) could have reduced the P600 for the deaf readers (ASL does not have English-like agreement). Another possibility is that the lack of sensitivity to grammatical violations was due to early language deprivation since 90% of the deaf participants were exposed to ASL later in childhood. Third, deaf and hearing readers may rely on different types of linguistic information when reading sentences, with deaf readers relying more on semantic information. To explore these hypotheses, we used the same RSVP ERP methods and sentence stimuli as Mehravari et al. (2017) but also implemented two changes. First, we added a phrase structure violation condition (I poured some coffee him for this morning.) because phrase structure constraints are parallel for ASL and English, and thus we could investigate whether the lack of a P600 effect in deaf readers reflects an overall lack of sensitivity to English syntactic structure or only a lack of sensitivity to verb agreement violations. Second, the current study only included native and early ASL signers who were not at risk for language deprivation. As in the Mehravari study, we compared deaf readers (N = 31) with a group of reading-matched monolingual English speakers (N = 31). We replicated the N400 and P600 effects found by Mehravari et al. for hearing readers, and also observed a strong P600 for phrase structure violations. We also replicated the lack of a P600 effect for verb agreement violations for deaf readers who were native/early signers, suggesting that early language deprivation does not account for this group difference. Deaf readers exhibited a robust P600 for phrase structure violations, indicating sensitivity to word order constraints. For only the deaf readers, we observed an N400 that extended into the P600 window (600-900ms) for both the semantic and double violation conditions, and moreover the N400 effects were larger for the deaf than hearing readers. This result suggests that deaf readers may be more sensitive to semantic information during sentence reading. Mehravari, A. S., Emmorey, K., Prat, C. S., Klarman, L., & Osterhout, L. (2017). Neuropsychologia, 101, 153-168.
Topic Areas: Reading,