Deaf and hearing signers’ sensitivity to English word order and morphosyntactic violations: an ERPs study

In this study, we aim to investigate a possible language transfer phenomenon between American Sign Language (ASL) and written English, specifically whether signers, both deaf and hearing (CODAs, Children of Deaf Adults), are less sensitive to English adjective-noun word order violations (e.g., *dog brown) because ASL allows both noun-adjective and adjective-noun word orders. In addition, we will examine signers’ sensitivity to English subject-verb agreement violations (e.g., “*this man are“) because this type of morphosyntactic verb marking does not occur in ASL. Previous research has shown that deaf ASL signers are not sensitive to such morphosyntactic violations in sentences with weaker morphosyntactic cues, e.g., the presence or absence of an ‘s’ regular verb marking (e.g., “the man play”). Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we will track neural responses associated with word order and morphosyntactic violations, and we will compare hearing and deaf signers’ ERPs with those of English-speaking monolinguals. Participants will perform an acceptability judgment task, and written sentences will be presented in a moving window or “RSVP with flankers” paradigm. Sentences could be acceptable in English (i) following the adjective–noun order or (ii) having correct double grammatical number agreement marked (determiner-subject and subject-verb agreement), or not acceptable in English by (iii) following the noun-adjective order or (iv) having a subject-verb agreement violation in sentences that should have double grammatical number agreement marked.