No abstract

Since signs and words are perceived and produced in distinct sensory-motor systems, they do not share a phonological basis. Nevertheless, many deaf bilinguals master a spoken language with input merely based on visual cues like mouth representations of spoken words and orthographic representations of written words. Recent findings further suggest that processing of words involves cross-language cross-modal co-activation of signs in deaf and hearing bilinguals. Extending these findings in the present ERP-study, we recorded the electroencephalogram (EEG) of fifteen congenitally deaf bilinguals of German Sign Language (DGS) (native L1) and German (early L2) as they saw videos of semantically and grammatically acceptable sentences in DGS. Within these DGS-sentences, two signs functioned as prime and target. Prime and target signs either had an overt phonological overlap as signs (phonological priming in DGS), or were phonologically unrelated as signs but had a covert orthographic overlap in their written German translation (orthographic priming in German). Results showed a significant priming effect for both conditions. Target signs that were either phonologically related as signs or had an underlying orthographic overlap in their written German translation engendered a less negative going polarity in the electrophysiological signal compared to overall unrelated control targets. We thus provide first evidence that deaf bilinguals co-activate their secondly acquired 'spoken/written' language German during whole sentence processing of their native sign language DGS.

Sign languages use the horizontal plane to refer to discourse referents introduced at referential locations. However, the question remains whether the assignment of discourse referents follows a particular default pattern as recently proposed such that two new discourse referents are respectively assigned to the right (ipsilateral) and left (contralateral) side of (right handed) signers. The present event-related potential study on German Sign Language investigates the hypothesis that signers assign distinct and contrastive referential locations to discourse referents even in the absence of overt localization. By using a semantic mismatch-design, we constructed sentence sets where the second sentence was either consistent or inconsistent with the used pronoun. Semantic mismatch conditions evoked an N400, whereas a contralateral index sign engendered a Phonological Mismatch Negativity. The current study provides supporting evidence that signers are sensitive to the mismatch and make use of a default pattern to assign distinct and contrastive referential locations to discourse referents.