Verb Restriction And Semantic Context In Sentence Comprehension By Deaf Readers:An Erp Study And A Comparison With Hearing Readers

Semantic integration is the core process of sentence comprehension.Due to early hearing loss or impairment,the cerebral cortex function of deaf is changed,and their reading comprehension ability is lower than that hearing.However,most of the research focuses on the description of the reading comprehension difficulty for deaf,and there is a lack of research on the reading mechanism behind it.So how and when do deaf process and integrate semantic information in sentences? Is there any difference between the deaf and hearing peers? At present,we examined whether the time course of semantic processing in sentence comprehension for deaf and hearing.In the present study,we aim to investigate the neural mechanism of different levels of semantic processing in sentence comprehension for deaf.ERP and semantic violation paradigm are used to manipulate verb restriction and semantic context from the sentence level.The verb is the core of sentence semantics,and the integration reflected by the context is the core process of reading comprehension,which are both significant processes of sentence level semantic processing.Therefore,in our study includes:In the experiment 1,investigated verb restriction in sentence comprehension for deaf.By comparing two groups of participants(group: deaf vs.hearing peers),the results showed that: 1)In the mean amplitudes,the semantic incongruent condition induced a left-N400 effect in the deaf,and the N400 effect in the hearing were widely distributed;2)In the peak latency,compared with the hearing,the deaf induced a later N400 effect.The results showed that the verb restriction affected sentence processing in deaf,but the violation effect was different from the hearing,showing a left lateralization N400 effect,and it was later.These results indicated that verb restriction can affect sentence comprehension of deaf,but the effects are different from hearing in terms of distribution and time course.Deaf are slower to extract verb restriction information,which is mainly processed by the left brain.In the experiment 2,investigated semantic context processing in sentence comprehension for deaf.The results showed that: 1)In the mean amplitudes,semantic incongruent condition induced the N400 effect in both deaf and hearing,only the hearing induced a P600 effect;2)In the peak latency,compared with the hearing,deaf induced a later N400 effect.The results showed that context can affect sentence processing in deaf,but only hearing induce P600 effect,and the N400 effect in deaf is later than the hearing.The above results indicated that the deaf also processed context in sentence processing,but the processing is relatively shallow,which is reflected in semantic integration and lacks the reanalysis process of the whole context.In conclusion,this study found that both verb restriction and semantic context would affect sentence comprehension of the deaf.However,the deaf extracted both information was slower than that of the hearing,and tended to process information in the left brain.In addition,importantly,deaf could not deeply integrate context and lack the process of reanalysis of the whole sentence content.