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ERP evidence for the role of morphology in word recognition by deaf and hearing readers
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Poster C125 in Poster Session C, Wednesday, October 25, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Sadie Camilliere1,2, Katherine J. Midgley1, Philip J. Holcomb1, Karen Emmorey1; 1San Diego State University, 2University of California San Diego
Phonological awareness is a strong predictor of reading ability in hearing individuals, but phonological information is not as easily accessible for deaf people. Morphology, which takes advantage of spelling to meaning connections, provides an alternative route to reading which deaf readers may prioritize. Grainger and Ziegler (2011)’s dual-route model of orthographic processing describes a morpho-semantic route in which coarse-grained, whole-word recognition allows for fast access to semantic information, and a morpho-orthographic route through which complex words can be broken down into their component parts. The event-related potentials (ERP) visual masked priming paradigm is sensitive to both routes of processing, with graded effects of priming for morphologically complex prime-target pairs (hunter-HUNT), pseudo-complex pairs (corner-CORN), and simplex pairs that were orthographically, but not semantically related (scandal-SCAN) (Morris, 2007). In the current study, we adopted this paradigm to investigate how deaf readers utilize morphological processes while reading different types of primes. Deaf and hearing participants completed a go-no-go lexical decision task while viewing prime-target pairs in which the prime was preceded and followed by a visual mask. If deaf readers rely more on morphology than hearing readers, they may exhibit greater morphological priming, indicated by greater reductions in the N250 ERP component (orthographic processing) and the N400 component in related vs. unrelated trials. In line with the results of Morris et al. (2007), complex primes (hunter-HUNT) elicited the strongest priming effects across both groups in the N400 window with smaller but statistically significant priming effects seen for the pseudo-complex and simplex pairs. Comparisons between the groups revealed that for both complex and pseudo-complex items hearing readers produced larger N250 and N400 priming effects than deaf readers. There were no group differences for either component in the simplex condition. The hearing readers demonstrated the typical central-anterior N250 priming effect between 200 and 300 ms and a more central-posterior N400 priming effect between 300 and 500 ms for both complex and pseudo-complex pairs, suggesting that they engaged in an initial morphological decomposition process (N250) when presented with either a complex (e.g., “hunter”) or pseudo-complex primes (e.g., “corner”). Deaf readers, on the other hand, produced a more central-posterior pattern in the N250 window which is more suggestive of an early N400 effect as opposed to a typical N250. They also continued to produce a similarly distributed N400 effect in the 300-500 ms window for complex and pseudo-complex pairs. The more posterior N250 and following N400 pattern is in line with the hypothesis that deaf readers rely more on a whole-word, morpho-semantic based processing route, such that they process pseudo-complex primes like “corner” as whole words, and do not decompose them into the apparent morphological components. (Morris, J., Frank, T., Grainger, J., & Holcomb, P. J. (2007). Semantic transparency and masked morphological priming: An ERP investigation. Psychophysiology, 44(4), 506-521.)
Topic Areas: Reading, Morphology