Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-10-2017
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 (700–900 ms). Overall, these results indicate modality-independent language co-activation that persists longer for bimodal bilinguals.
Recommended Citation
Meade, G., Midgley, K., Sehyr, Sevcikova Z., Holcomb, P., & Emmorey, K. (2017) Implicit co-activation of American Sign Language in deaf readers: An ERP study. Brain and Language 170, 50-61. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2017.03.004
Peer Reviewed
1
Copyright
Elsevier
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Comments
NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Brain and Language. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Brain and Language, volume 170, in 2017. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2017.03.004
The Creative Commons license below applies only to this version of the article.