Implicit co-activation of American Sign Language in deaf readers: An ERP study

Abstract

In an implicit phonological priming paradigm, deaf bimodal bilinguals made semantic relatedness decisions for pairs of English words. Half of the semantically unrelated pairs had phonologically related translations in American Sign Language (ASL). As in previous studies with unimodal bilinguals, targets in pairs with phonologically related translations elicited smaller negativities than targets in pairs with phonologically unrelated translations within the N400 window. This suggests that the same lexicosemantic mechanism underlies implicit co-activation of a non-target language, irrespective of language modality. In contrast to unimodal bilingual studies that find no behavioral effects, we observed phonological interference, indicating that bimodal bilinguals may not suppress the non-target language as robustly. Further, there was a subset of bilinguals who were aware of the ASL manipulation (determined by debrief), and they exhibited an effect of ASL phonology in a later time window (700–900ms). Overall, these results indicate modality-independent language co-activation that persists longer for bimodal bilinguals.

Having a different pointing of view about the future: The effect of signs on co-speech gestures about time in Mandarin–CSL bimodal bilinguals

“…For example, Morford, Wilkinson, Villwock, Piñar and Kroll (2011) found that ASL–English bilingual deaf readers activate the ASL translations of written words in English even when the task does not explicitly require the use of ASL. Recent ERP research also reveals that there is an implicit co-activation of ASL in deaf readers (Meade, Midgley, Sevcikova Sehyr, Holcomb & Emmorey, 2017). In our study, late bimodal bilinguals produced significantly more sagittal temporal gestures than non-signers.…”

Phonological priming in German Sign Language: An eye tracking study using the Visual World Paradigm

“…In contrast, ERP data on ASL showed reduced N400 amplitude for phonologically related prime-target pairs suggesting a facilitation effect in both implicit, i.e., reading words whose ASL translations are phonologically related, and explicit priming contexts (Meade et al 2017;Meade et al 2018). While Gutiérrez, Müller, et al (2012) investigated pairs overlapping in one parameter, Meade et al (2018) presented pairs overlapping in two out of three parameters, which might explain the opposing direction of effects reported in these studies.…”

A tale of two frequency effects: Toward a verification model of L2 word recognition

“…Assuming that activation decays over successive links, activations involving multiple links may not always be reliably detected. This may explain the inconsistencies in the results in Thierry and Wu's three studies, in the behavior results of Thierry and Wu (2001) and Meade et al (2017), and in the results between Zhang et al (2011) and .…”