Early use of phonological codes in deaf readers: An ERP study

Abstract

Previous studies suggest that deaf readers use phonological information of words when it is explicitly demanded by the task itself. However, whether phonological encoding is automatic remains controversial. The present experiment examined whether adult congenitally deaf readers show evidence of automatic use of phonological information during visual word recognition. In an ERP masked priming lexical decision experiment, deaf participants responded to target words preceded by a pseudohomophone (koral - CORAL) or an orthographic control prime (toral - CORAL). Responses were faster for the pseudohomophone than for the orthographic control condition. The N250 and N400 amplitudes were reduced for the pseudohomophone when compared to the orthographic control condition. Furthermore, the magnitude of both the behavioral and the ERP pseudohomophone effects in deaf readers was similar to that of a group of well-matched hearing controls. These findings reveal that phonological encoding is available to deaf readers from the early stages of visual word recognition. Finally, the pattern of correlations of phonological priming with reading ability suggested that the amount of sub-lexical use of phonological information could be a main contributor to reading ability for hearing but not for deaf readers.

Reading Skills in Deaf Subjects: Role of Psycholinguistic Factors and Global Influences in Affecting Reading Performance

“…Based on a masked phonological priming paradigm, Gutierrez-Sigut et al (2018) reported that deaf individuals showed faster word identification times in the pseudo-homophone than in the control condition. Similar results were reported in a study using both behavioural and ERP measures (Gutierrez-Sigut et al, 2017) and in a study on English children by Blythe et al (2018). Transler and Reitsma (2005) found that pseudo-homophony effects were present but smaller in deaf individuals than in hearing controls.…”

Emmorey_Reading_Chapter_2020

“…Specifically, the size of the N400 effect was strongly correlated with reading ability for deaf but not hearing individuals. A similar finding was reported by Gutierrez-Sigut et al (2017) for the N400 pseudohomophone priming effect with single words; that is, the size of the N400 effect correlated with reading ability for deaf but not hearing participants. In contrast, the size of the P600 response to syntactic violations was related to reading ability for the hearing but not the deaf participants.…”

“…Pseudohomophones are nonwords that sound like real words if pronounced (e.g., werk, brane). Gutierrez-Sigut et al (2017) found evidence for pseudohomophone priming in both their behavioral and ERP results. Deaf readers made faster lexical decisions when the target word was preceded by a pseudohomophone prime (koral -CORAL) than an orthographically-related nonword prime (toral -CORAL), and the N250 amplitude was reduced (indicating priming) for the pseudohomophone compared to the orthographic control condition.…”

“…Whether deaf readers automatically activate phonological representations when reading words (or sentences) is still unclear. Gutierrez-Sigut et al (2017) found ERP evidence for implicit activation of phonological representations (i.e., reduced N250 negativity for masked pseudohomophone primes) for deaf readers of Spanish, a language with transparent orthography, but others have failed to find evidence for implicit activation of phonological codes during sentence or word reading for languages with more opaque orthographies. Glezer et al (2018) found that skilled deaf readers exhibited phonological tuning to words in temporal-parietal cortex, although the phonological selectivity was more coarse-grained than that observed for typical hearing readers.…”

L2-L1 Translation Priming Effects in a Lexical Decision Task: Evidence From Low Proficient Korean-English Bilinguals

“…Second, in our experimental procedures, a blank screen was presented between the prime and target, which could make the prime stimulus more salient, and therefore might increase the possibility that participants could process the prime consciously. Note that a recent ERP study also inserted a blank period between prime and target in order to maximize the size of the priming effects (Jiang, 1999 ; Gutierrez-Sigut et al, 2017 ). An interesting goal for future research is to carefully examine how differences in priming techniques might modulate the magnitude of priming effects.…”