The influence of language deprivation in early childhood on L2 processing: An ERP comparison of deaf native signers and deaf signers with a delayed language acquisition

BMC Neuroscience

Research Article

Monique Kügow¹  Nils Skotara¹  Uta Salden¹  Brigitte Röder¹  Barbara Hänel-Faulhaber² 

[1] Biologische Psychologie & Neuropsychologie, Universität Hamburg, Von-Melle-Park 11, 20146, Hamburg, Germany;Erziehungswissenschaften, Sektion II: Wahrnehmung & Kommunikation, Universität Hamburg, Sedanstr. 19, 20146, Hamburg, Germany;

关键词: Sign Language;    Critical Word;    Semantic Condition;    Deaf People;    N400 Effect;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2202-13-44

 received in 2011-11-08, accepted in 2012-05-03,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundTo examine which language function depends on early experience, the present study compared deaf native signers, deaf non-native signers and hearing German native speakers while processing German sentences. The participants watched simple written sentences while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. At the end of each sentence they were asked to judge whether the sentence was correct or not. Two types of violations were introduced in the middle of the sentence: a semantically implausible noun or a violation of subject-verb number agreement.ResultsThe results showed a similar ERP pattern after semantic violations (an N400 followed by a positivity) in all three groups. After syntactic violations, native German speakers and native signers of German sign language (DGS) with German as second language (L2) showed a left anterior negativity (LAN) followed by a P600, whereas no LAN but a negativity over the right hemisphere instead was found in deaf participants with a delayed onset of first language (L1) acquisition. The P600 of this group had a smaller amplitude and a different scalp distribution as compared to German native speakers.ConclusionsThe results of the present study suggest that language deprivation in early childhood alters the cerebral organization of syntactic language processing mechanisms for L2. Semantic language processing instead was unaffected.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© Skotara et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.