ERP Effects of masked orthographic neighbour priming in deaf readers

ABSTRACT

In masked priming studies with hearing readers, neighbouring words (e.g. wine, vine) compete through lateral inhibition. Here, we asked whether lateral inhibition also characterises visual word recognition in deaf readers and whether the neural signature of this competition is the same as for hearing readers. Only real words have lexical representations that engage in lateral inhibition. Therefore, we compared processing of target words following neighbouring prime words (e.g. wine-VINE) and pseudowords (e.g. bine-VINE). Targets following prime words elicited larger amplitude N400s and slower lexical decision responses, indicating more effortful processing due to lateral inhibition. Although these effects went in the same direction for hearing and deaf readers, the distribution of the N400 effect differed. We associate the more anterior effect in hearing readers with stronger co-activation of, and competition among, phonological representations. Thus, deaf readers use lexical competition to recognise visual words, but it is primarily restricted to orthographic representations.

KEYWORDS:

• Deaf readers
• orthographic neighbours
• masked priming
• event-related potentials

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Cindy O’Grady Farnady and Philip Combiths in addition to the participants, without whom this research would not be possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Orthographic neighbourhood density was also included as a factor in the analyses reported by Meade et al. (2018). In the present study, there were no significant interactions between Neighbourhood and Prime Lexicality, so we only focus on the latter.

Additional information

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences grant number BCS-1439257 and Graduate Research Fellowship number 2016196208, and by the National Institutes of Health under National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders grant number DC014246 and Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development grant number HD025889. JG was supported by ERC grant 742141.