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The Neurophysiology of Visual Rhyme Data in Deaf Undergraduate Readers
Poster Session A, Friday, September 12, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm, Field House
Karen Garrido-Nag1, Daniel Koo1, Lawrence Pick1; 1Gallaudet University
This study investigated the neural time-course and distribution of neural activation during a rhyming task in pre-lingually deaf undergraduate students. Participants were deaf individuals with moderate-to-profound hearing loss, and the majority of the participants reported using American Sign Language (ASL) as their primary mode of communication. On average, students had completed 3.1 years of college, and approximately half of the participants were born to hearing parents. A comprehensive battery of neuropsychological measures was administered to gain a better understanding of the cognitive, linguistic, and reading profiles of these deaf students. The battery included: the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence (WASI; Perceptual Reasoning and Vocabulary subtests), the Peabody Individual Achievement Test-Revised (PIAT-R), the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test (WRMT), the Wechsler Memory Scale-Fourth Edition (WMS-IV), the Psychology Reading Test (PDT), American College Testing (ACT) scores, and cumulative Grade Point Average (GPA). In the experimental task, participants judged whether two visually (printed) words rhymed (e.g., chair-pear), with all stimuli deemed appropriate for a Second-grade reading level. Of the 48 participants, 22 demonstrated behavioral performance at or above chance level on the rhyme judgment task and were included in the ERP analysis. We looked at three ERP components in these 22 participants: (1) Contingent Negative Variation (CNV), a sustained negative response following the priming stimulus reflecting rehearsal and working memory; (2) Rhyming Effect (RE), characterized by enhanced negativity (N450) to non-rhyming second stimulus words compared to rhyming second stimulus words (targets); and (3) Late Negativity (LN), possibly reflecting working memory load or cognitive effort. Results show a CNV that was observed between 400ms ‐800 ms following the prime stimulus. CNV was significantly greater over the right hemisphere compared to the left hemisphere (p=.02). This negativity was prominent over the central sites. These sites are not similar to what is reported in the literature. The RE did not reach significance (p=.06) across the group for the 22 participants. However, individual analyses revealed that 10 of the of 22 had discernable RE, primarily in the right frontal-central and left parietal electrode sites. The RE occurred around 350-600 ms. A LN was not observed for this participant pool. The absence of group-level RE and LN suggests that many deaf undergraduate readers may not fully utilize phonology during a visual rhyme judgment task. Instead, participants may rely more heavily on whole word recognition strategy for this reading task. Correlations between ERP effects and neuropsychological measures were weak (r=+.3 to ‐.3), indicating that ERP rhyme effects were only modestly associated with individual differences in language and reading skills. Participants generally demonstrated weaker performance on linguistic measures strongly linked to reading success, particularly in vocabulary, phonology, and comprehension of sentences and passages. Overall, these findings provide new insight into the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying reading in deaf individuals, highlighting a potential reliance on non-phonological processing strategies during the word recognition task.
Topic Areas: Reading, Language Development/Acquisition