Emmorey Karen, Akers Emily M, Martinez Priscilla M, Midgley Katherine J, Holcomb Phillip J
School of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, SDSU, United States; Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communication Disorders, SDSU and UCSD, United States.
Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communication Disorders, SDSU and UCSD, United States.
Neuropsychologia. 2025 Aug 13;215:109171. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2025.109171. Epub 2025 May 15.
An ERP study by Mehravari et al. (2017) found deaf and hearing readers had similar N400 effects to semantic violations, but only hearing readers showed a P600 effect to verb agreement violations. To assess whether lack of sensitivity to agreement was due to early language deprivation, we presented the same stimuli (and a phrase structure violation condition) to deaf readers with early ASL exposure and a reading-matched hearing group. We also examined N400 "wrap up" effects for sentence final words. Both groups exhibited an N400 effect for semantic violations (larger negativities for errors), although the effect was unexpectedly weak for hearing readers. At the violation, only hearing readers exhibited a P600 for verb agreement violations (larger positivities for errors), indicating that the previous findings are not explained by language deprivation. Crucially, both groups exhibited an N400 effect on the sentence-final word for agreement violations - despite poor performance on the acceptability judgment task. Both deaf and hearing readers showed a robust P600 to phrase structure violations. We interpret this overall pattern as indicating that deaf readers engage in monitoring strategies whereby English phrase structure, but not verb morphology, is anticipated during reading, and that both groups exhibit neural sensitivity to grammatical errors during sentence final integration processes. The amplitude of the P600 for grammatical violations was correlated with reading skill only for hearing readers. We conclude that reading strategies for skilled deaf readers who are bilingual in ASL differ from hearing monolingual readers with similar reading skills.
梅拉瓦里等人（2017年）的一项事件相关电位（ERP）研究发现，聋人读者和听力正常的读者在对语义违反方面具有相似的N400效应，但只有听力正常的读者在动词一致性违反方面表现出P600效应。为了评估对一致性缺乏敏感性是否是由于早期语言剥夺造成的，我们向早期接触美国手语（ASL）的聋人读者和阅读能力匹配的听力正常组呈现了相同的刺激（以及一个短语结构违反条件）。我们还研究了句子末尾单词的N400“收尾”效应。两组在语义违反方面都表现出N400效应（错误情况下负波更大），尽管听力正常的读者的效应出乎意料地弱。在违反情况出现时，只有听力正常的读者在动词一致性违反方面表现出P600（错误情况下正波更大），这表明先前的研究结果不能用语言剥夺来解释。至关重要的是，两组在一致性违反的句子末尾单词上都表现出N400效应——尽管在可接受性判断任务中的表现不佳。聋人和听力正常的读者在短语结构违反方面都表现出强烈的P600。我们将这一总体模式解释为表明聋人读者采用监测策略，即在阅读过程中预期英语短语结构，但不预期动词形态，并且两组在句子末尾整合过程中对语法错误都表现出神经敏感性。语法违反的P600波幅仅与听力正常读者的阅读技能相关。我们得出结论，熟练掌握ASL的双语聋人读者的阅读策略与具有相似阅读技能的听力单语读者不同。
