Characterizing language production across modalities

ABSTRACT

This study investigates factors influencing lexical access in language production across modalities (signed and oral). Data from deaf and hearing signers were reanalyzed (Baus and Costa, 2015, On the temporal dynamics of sign production: An ERP study in Catalan Sign Language (LSC). Brain Research, 1609(1), 40-53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2015.03.013; Gimeno-Martínez and Baus, 2022, Iconicity in sign language production: Task matters. Neuropsychologia, 167, 108166. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2022.108166) testing the influence of psycholinguistic variables and ERP mean amplitudes on signing and naming latencies. Deaf signers' signing latencies were influenced by sign iconicity in the picture signing task, and by spoken psycholinguistic variables in the word-to-sign translation task. Additionally, ERP amplitudes before response influenced signing but not translation latencies. Hearing signers' latencies, both signing and naming, were influenced by sign iconicity and word frequency, with early ERP amplitudes predicting only naming latencies. These findings highlight general and modality-specific determinants of lexical access in language production.

KEYWORDS:

• Lexical access
• lexical processing
• EEG
• psycholinguistic variables
• sign languages

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term picture signing task is used throughout this manuscript to refer to the task of naming pictures in a sign language, while the term picture naming task is used to describe the same task but performed in an oral language.

2 From the 17 participants included in the final analysis, 9 were Catalan dominant speakers and 8 were Spanish dominant speakers. Measures of word frequency were highly correlated between Catalan (range: −1.6 - 3; M = 0.95, SD = 0.7) and Spanish (range: 0 - 2.8, M = 1.1, SD = 0.5), r = −78**, p < .001. Both language measures influenced naming latencies of Spanish and Catalan dominant speakers (all t`s > 3).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigación [grant no PID2021-128324NB-I00], and the Ramon y Cajal research program [grant no RYC2018-026174-I].