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Neural associations between fingerspelling, print, and signs: An ERP priming study with deaf readers
Poster Session E, Sunday, September 14, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm, Field House
Brittany Lee1, Sofia Ortega2, Priscilla Martinez2, Katherine J. Midgley2, Phillip J. Holcomb2, Karen Emmorey2; 1Chapman University, 2San Diego State University
Fingerspelling is a leading predictor of reading ability for deaf people who use a signed language, but few neuroimaging studies have examined how it supports reading. We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate how fingerspelled words prime printed words. Twenty-four skilled deaf adult readers who were native or early signers of American Sign Language (ASL) participated in this study. Participants completed a Go/No-Go semantic categorization task (i.e., detect an occasional animal name) while viewing printed English word targets following related and unrelated primes in one of three conditions: printed English words, ASL signs, and fingerspelled words. N400 priming effects were strong across all three conditions. Because it would be difficult to compare target words with primes from different modalities, we calculated difference waves by subtracting the related condition from the unrelated condition within each prime type. This approach allowed us to remove any modality-specific effects from the ERPs prior to analysis in order to compare priming of printed target words by each prime type. Difference waves showed that early N400 effects were similar for printed word primes and fingerspelled word primes but weaker for sign primes, suggesting shared orthographic representations for printed and fingerspelled words. Late N400 effects were strongest for printed word primes, reflecting less effortful processing when primes and targets were in the same language and the same printed modality. Overall, the differences in the magnitude, latency, and distribution of the N400 priming effects observed in this study suggest a stronger relationship between fingerspelling and print than between signs and print. These findings provide evidence for cross-language and cross-modal priming between fingerspelled and printed words and underscore the importance of fingerspelling in developing word representations for skilled reading.
Topic Areas: Reading, Signed Language and Gesture